It may be possible to watch a thousand sunsets and not see one like Saturday evening’s in Washington, which set the western sky ablaze and included a fiery column of orange light that reached upward from the horizon, long, narrow and brilliant.
Such blazing stripes, which seem to transform the circularity of the sun into an elongated shaft of flame, have been witnessed before. Although not an everyday sight, they have entered into the vocabulary of meteorologists and other sky watchers. They are called sun pillars.
By apparent coincidence, and in possible defiance of the odds, Saturday’s sun pillar was the second this week. Another was spotted on Tuesday.
Sun pillars are created by the reflection of sunlight into an arrangement of six-sided ice crystals in the atmosphere. But they also seem sufficiently striking to demand a less technical explanation, one less rooted in the rigid laws of optics.
Seeing these glowing atmospheric artifacts may recall the power of phrases from the Bible, and the biblical pillar of fire that plays a role in the book of Exodus.
It is not clear how significant or portentous the sun pillar was in the western sky, as seen from D.C. a few minutes before 5 p.m. on Saturday. However, it came mere hours before forecasts suggest another December snowfall could occur Sunday morning.
Meanwhile, to the untrained or to the casual observer, Saturday did not seem particularly suggestive of any forthcoming storm. In the morning, its gray clouds seemed much like the gray clouds of many another dry December day.
Those morning clouds seemed to carry no obvious message. Did they urge the citizenry to go forth and stock up on groceries? Or did they counsel a return to bed and sleep? It was hard to say.
But it did not seem that nostrils were assailed by what is sometimes called the smell of snow.
It seemed wintry. Trees were largely bare, and the frequent grayness of the afternoon light created a quality of bleakness. But the thermometer did not conform to the image of a day deep in winter.
Saturday’s temperatures did not seem overly frosty. The high reading in the capital was 44 degrees. That is five below average, and three warmer than last year. The morning low was 28, but by 7 a.m. the mercury had climbed above freezing.
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