Wednesday Search Challenge (March 17, 2010): What is it?

One of the most difficult things to discover is what something is called when you don't know its name....

This is actually a double-edged sword.  Because you don't know what something is, you might very well miss noticing it.  Yeah, it's true--you tend to miss things if they're not familiar or have a name.  This is a really interesting distinction--because you can SEE something, but then when you look away, you'll have a very hard time remembering all the things you saw that don't have convenient names!

Here's a real-life thing that happened to me yesterday.  I was out riding my bike in the hills near home when I turned the corner and saw this:

This isn't the best picture (it was taken with my Droid phone), but it shows that bright patch of sky to the right of the sun with a little bit of a bright arc.

As it happens, I now what this is.  Perhaps you do too... but pretend for a minute that you don't actually know what this is.

How would you find out more about it?  What's this thing called?  And... how do you learn more about this phenomenon??

Everything you need to know in order to figure it out is right here in this photo.

Search on!