Even though I had no formal optics training at that time, I took special care to photograph this optical treat, even thinking that someday I would like to understand this glittering light better. With the passage of time, I have discovered that understanding how glitter patterns are formed, and even forming my own glitter patterns to measure sea-surface roughness, helps me enjoy nature's glitter even more. Glitter patterns consist of many bright points of light that come and go, blending together to form a smooth path of glittering light when viewed at a distance. If you look closely at a glitter pattern, you can see individual points of light. Each of these points of light is a specular reflection of the sun, called a sun glint.
Glints occur on the water where the local slope provides a direct specular reflection of the sun.
A perfectly smooth surface would contain only one glint. It is this kind of glass-smooth surface that produces the nearly perfect images we see in nature calendars of mountains reflected in a lake. But if the water surface is rippled by even the slightest wind, reflected images become wrinkled and indistinct. As the wind-rippled surface moves, so do individual glints. But the ensemble of glints produces a glitter pattern whose shape and size can be related to the roughness of the water and the viewing geometry.