Mara L. Crowell, age 10, of Sherrill, New York, for her question:

What is a sundog?

No, it is not a beagle or any kind of a hound. A sundog is a very rare spectacle in the sky and as a rule, it appears as one of a pair. The two sundogs look like two small suns, one on each side of the big sun in the middle. Actually, only the big sun is real. The small twins are merely reflections of its dazzling image. The massive, starry sun is, as always, almost 93 million miles away from us. The sundogs are bright little pictures in the atmosphere just a few miles above our heads. Maybe ordinary folk called them sundogs because they appear like a pair of poodles beside their mother.

The reflections that cause the rare sundogs to show their faces are caused by hazes of miniature ice crystals high in the atmosphere. These icy fragments act like specks of shiny glass and play sparkling tricks with the sunbeams on their way down to the earth. Zillions of tiny reflections of the sun are angled together to form each sundog image of the real sun. If you ever get a chance to see the sundogs, remember not to let your naked eyes look directly at them. View them through very dark glasses or a screen of smoked glass because the direct rays of the sun are dazzling enough to blind human eyes.