Moondogs!!! Have you ever seen moondogs? I didn't realize there was such a phenomenon. I took this picture last night - New Year's Eve - speeding along between Carrington and New Rockford, so it's not a very good look at them. I was so amazed at what I was seeing that I didn't get my camera out till the moondogs almost disappeared. Did any of you local folks get a shot of them? I'm hoping they will appear again tonight.

According to Wikipedia: "A moon dog, moondog, or mock moon,... meaning "beside the moon"... is a relatively rare bright circular spot on a lunar halo caused by the refraction of moonlight by hexagonal-plate-shaped ice crystals in cirrus or cirrostratus clouds... Moon dogs appear as part of the 22° halo, roughly 10 Moon diameters outside the Moon. They are exactly analogous to sun dogs, but are rarer because the Moon must be bright, about quarter moon or more, for the moon dogs to be observed. Moon dogs show little color to the unaided human eye because their light is not bright enough to activate the cone cells."

(By the way today's moon - January 1, 2018 - is called a supermoon. That occurs when the full moon is at the closest point of its orbit to the Earth. If you don't get to see the super moon tonight, another instance will occur again on January 31st.)
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