Surfing under a halo in Montauk yesterday — the same storm sending us swell was crowning the sky with light. When I was a child, I spent summers sailing with my father along the New England coast. He taught me to read the sky and the water long before I learned to read a chart. He believed you shouldn’t rely on a Loran until you knew the stars, and many nights were spent talking weather under the constellations. Those lessons return whenever I see the weather shift— maple leaves turning their palms to the wind meant a storm, a ring around the sun meant rain in summer, snow in winter. Yesterday’s halo brought all of that back. High cirrus clouds made of ice crystals bend light into circles at precise angles: 22° for the bright inner ring, sometimes 46° for a larger arc. If you looked up, you could see a full circle around the sun with arcs stretching at the edges. Different crystal shapes scatter the light into these arcs and into sundogs — bright rainbow spots that appear to the left...