wiki_z: RainpostsAndGodrays

Sometimes Nature throws beauty like a pie into my face, so I can't miss it no matter how oblivious I am. (Thank you!) Two recent examples:

At dawn last week, as I started my drive to the office on a drab early work day, suddenly rising above the highway stood a pastel pillar of colors. It was a fragment of a rainbow --- an arc too short and of too large a radius to show much curvature. The sun was rising behind me and, although I was still immersed in gray shadow, an invisible beam peeked through the clouds and prismed back from the water droplets ahead. If you will, a rainpost ...
At the sunset end of a 12-hour thunderstorm-slashed drive to New Hampshire last month, and again in early morning a few days ago, brilliantly glowing beams splayed out from torn cloudbanks that blocked the sun itself. These fingers of light always remind me of the Luminist School of early American oil painting. Paulette calls them Godrays ...