Solar pillar this morning! Sun, or Solar pillars happen at sunrise or sunset when there are ice crystals in the clouds. The ice crystals are in the shape of hexagonal plates. As they fall, while positioned horizontally and in a gentle rocking motion, the sunlight reflects off these tipped ice crystals to form the sun pillar. How someone figured out the way this happened is beyond my imagination.  Even more incomprehensible: how God designed this visual treat! 

Sun (or Solar) Pillar, Allegheny Mountains, Western Pennsylvania

My understanding of it is this: If you dropped a shiny plate, and it landed perfectly right side up, but on the way down it wobbled a bit, and a gazillion other people dropped shiny plates there at the same time (all wobbling like yours),  and there was a strong light source at the base of where you all dropped them, it would reflect off those wobbling edges, back and forth off the many plates, upward into a pillar of light.

Saw this from my window, I hurried out in my bare feet and PJs in the snow to get more pics!  Winter is still going strong here in early March, 2019, and we are a bit tired of it. But little treats like this brighten our spirits!

Here are a couple links to the best websites I found to further explain this phenomenon, complete with ice crystal diagrams in case my explanation didn’t quite do it justice :

http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/opt/ice/sp.rxml

https://www.weatheronline.co.uk/reports/wxfacts/Sun-pillar.htm