There are little things, little visual evidences, that pop up in our world to tell us how incredibly small we are. One such phenomena that has that effect on me is the appearance of anticrepuscular rays. See, the suns rays are parallel. It really, really doesn't feel like it, because the sun is so comparatively large and far away that the more common way we see rays of light from the sun- crepuscular rays -they appear to diverge from the source.
This is a scale issue, though, of the same order that a road's painted lines appear to get closer together the further away they are... it's just something we're much less familiar with seeing. Crepuscular rays are not remotely rare. They occur all the time when sun shine through clouds, leaves, or even sky scrapers in hazy conditions early or late in the day. The optical conditions that let those rays extend overhead are rarer, but they do occur. When they do, its spectacular.
Anticrepuscular rays occur when the suns ray are visible meeting again at infinity on the opposite wide of the sky from the sun. Very, very rarely, crepuscular rays meet anticrepuscular rays meet and span the whole sky, supposedly. I've never seen such an occurrence. One day in Florida, though, with the sun rising out over the Atlantic, I turned to the West and gasped at the sight of the best anticrepuscular rays I'd ever had the pleasure to see. It may seem a silly thing to feel small observing this, but in some sense this optical phenomena represents the scale of the light from our sun and the clouds in our atmosphere, going so far and visually spreading apart in such away that when you can see those rays on the other side of the sky, it looks like they just go on forever.
That's pretty darned cool if you ask me.
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