My thanks again to Alan Gibson for sending over some great images. These are sun dogs or parhelia and parts of a “22 degree halo”. They are created when the sunlights refracts through ice crystals, creating colourful effects a couple of fist widths from sun .
They can presage deteriorating weather or storms.
In the final picture below we can see something similar but different. There is what appears as a weak rainbow, which is actually part of a ’22 degree halo’, but above that there is the ‘bent smile’ of an ‘upper tangent arc’. They have the same meaning and weather warning as sun dogs – sunlight is passing through ice crystals – and are often visible at the same time.
