Luckily, I knew how to operate a camera. Light pillars above and below the sun, caused by reflection of sunlight off the flat, horizontal bases of ice crystals. Iridescent clouds are caused by diffraction of sunlight by cloud particles of much uniform size. The pastel colors of iridescent clouds look like those of an oily layer on a water surface. Heiligenschein is a very common, but also very beautiful effect of sunlight focusing on and reflecting by dewy grass or other vegetation.
Mirages come in different types.
The most common is the inferior mirage, by which light is bent upwards close to the surface, as is the case when cold air reaches over warm water surface, or air just over a hot asphalt road which is heated by the sun. Rainbows are known to almost every person. Cloud rays are seen diverging from the sun, and sometimes converging again to the antisolar point, forming the so-called antisolar rays or anticrepuscular rays. An uncommon phenomenon is the green flash of the top edge of the solar disk, when it disappears below the horizon. I tried my luck several times to photograph this, but until now I only have photos of the less dramatic effect, the sun's green rim and the green segment, visible even before the sun sets.