Welcome Back the Sun

We waited for 2 months and now the sun has finally come back. It had been cloudy for the past few weeks but on the 22nd the clouds cleared and we had a nice surprise. Here is a picture of my first glimpse of the sun:

Yeah it was cloudy and hazy, but it was still magnificent. A few days later the skies cleared and the sun really showed it's brilliance. We even opened the yurt windows and let all sots of natural light come flooding in. Here is a picture of Leo enjoying the novelty of shadows:

In fact, he was so excited we came inside and celebrated with ants on a log. (you know celery with peanut butter in the groove and raisins in the peanutbutter) I had to give him very small logs or this happened:

Keep those fingers away from the camera buddy.
Here is a picture of a phenomenon known as a sundog.

Can you see the faint rainbow off to the left? It's caused by sunlight shining through ice crystals in very high (cirrus) clouds. Sometimes, if the conditions are right, it makes a full rainbow around the sun. I've only seen that once.
Lastly, here is a repeat of a photo composition I posted in early November.

Unfortunately, the last time I took it I had my image quality on its lowest setting. No good for wanting to print pictures. When the opportunity presented itself again, I just had to grab it. I thought a little bit of yurt was a nice touch too. It might look like the sun is just rising but is is actually appearing and disappearing from behind the mountains. The sun is not traveling across the sky but rather doing a shallow arc above the horizon. I took thins photo at 1:00pm.
I hope you all are getting to enjoy some sunshine too!