Scott Alexander Holy crap! I just saw the solar miracle too, the red sun spinning, vibrating.

I better write down the details. 14:48 at 28th of December. Sun low in the sky, seen through the cloud cover. Low over the horizon. It was obscured by a cloud at first, but then the cloud moved away and I saw the solar disk, which I think was still probably obscured by the thinner, less obvious clouds. It wasn't painful to look at, but it was somewhat uncomfortable, and my eyes watered a little.

After I looked at it for a couple of moments and my eyes adjusted to brightness I started to see it is a clear disk. And then the area around it went magenta red, and the solar disk started to slightly jerk around, and appeared as if rapidly spinning. That was the most surprising thing, that it spun and wobbled, a phenomena I never saw before! "What does it mean for a featureless disk to appear to be spinning?" you might ask, reasonably. Hard to explain. I guess it appeared like there was a corona around it was of varying brightness, and it was the corona that was spinning, or it was the rays that were spinning, or the disk was of uneven brightness and that made the spin visible? When I say it appeared to be wobbling, I mean by maybe 1/10 of the sun's diameter or less, not that it was dancing all across the sky.

I watched in wonder for maybe 5-10 seconds, because it was pretty bright and though I maybe was being reckless by looking at all, I wasn't totally crazy.

What else should I note? Between me and the sun there were thin tree branches moved by the wind. Did they contribute to the wobble illusion?

After I stopped looking the afterimage remained, naturally. Now it has dissipated.

How many times, after reading the article, did I try, stupidly, to look and see the miracle? Maybe like 10 times? Always at the sun hanging low, looking at the bright zenith sun wouldn't even be possible.

i.imgur.com/O6sjK8Q.png - my photoshop mockup that does a good job showing the colors and the clouds, but a bad job of giving any sense of the apparent spin. There were no miraculous celestial watermarks floating in the sky, I just want to make this clear. That’s just because I grabbed the first image I could find.

Anyway, it was kind of neat but not worth risking eyes for (he sagely said after risking eyes like an idiot).