Over the course of her evening walk across the Knepp Estate in Sussex, England, Nicole Godwin (Member 20,372) saw pigs, piglets, red deer, and longhorn cattle. Her walk was also bookended by a pair of more celestial creatures: a sun dog at its start and two hours later a moon dog at its end.  

Sun dogs, also known as parhelia, are large spots of light that can appear on either side of the Sun, sometimes as a pair on both sides. They are examples of the halo phenomena that can form when sunlight bends, or refracts, as it shines through atmospheric ice crystals like the ones up in Nicole’s Cirrostratus cloud. Moon dogs, also known as paraselenae, are the nighttime equivalent, formed by the refraction of moonlight.  

Nicole saw a sun dog to the left of the Sun and a moon dog to the right of the Moon. You can think of them as daytime and nighttime beasts of the sky.