Sun pillars are a beautiful atmospheric phenomenon that can sometimes be seen at sunrise or sunset. Watch this video to learn more about how they form. Victor Davis Hanson explains why Judge ...

That's called a sun pillar. According to the National Weather Service, the optical phenomenon appears as a vertical shaft of ...

What look like light sabers or giant spotlights shooting straight up in the sky, light pillars are one of the most magnificent optical illusions. Light pillars occur when plate-shaped ice crystals ...

A REMARKABLY well-defined instance of this phenomenon was seen by me at this place (460 feet above mean sea-level) this afternoon. At 5.32 p.m. the sun was sinking behind a thick layer of stratus ...

Light pillars are a unique weather phenomenon that occurs on cold, calm nights in the dead of winter. They are very similar to sundogs, which features two rainbows surrounding the sun, ...

Stock image of a sun halo and sundogs as seen over a snowy mountain. This phenomenon, caused by light refracting through ice crystals in the air, was filmed over a mountain in Sweden.

On Thursday, the European Space Agency described the phenomenon as a "sun pillar" optical illusion created from sunlight reflecting from tiny ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere.

Light pillars belong to the same family of optical phenomena called photometeors, which includes halos, sun dogs, cloud irridescence, and rainbows. On cold, calm nights with higher humidity (for ...

That's called a sun pillar. According to the National Weather Service, the optical phenomenon appears as a vertical shaft of light, visible most often at sunrise or sundown.

Sun Pillar. The same phenomenon can occur with the sun as the light source, called a sun pillar. This occurs as the sun is setting and the same plate-shaped ice crystals are present.