To find the right part of the sky, hold out your outstretched arm with your fingers splayed out. The angular distance between your thumb and little finger is about 22-degrees, providing you have all your fingers. So if you place your thumb on the sun, look past your little finger and if there is anything there to see, you should see it. Their plane of orientation is random as they spin about their flat axis. High-level ice does often appear before rain, particularly in the warmer seasons, as a result of a cold front moving through.
Sundogs are basically small segments of a halo on either side of the sun.
They are produced by exactly the same interaction with sunlight and flat hexagonal ice crystals, however these crystals are all lying horizontal. Sundogs are quite difficult to see until you ve seen your first one. These guys are a bit of a rarity, well at least for me anyway. Unlike the ice crystals discussed earlier, tangential-arcs are produced by light passing through long hexagonal crystals, like pencils. Their plane of orientation is fairly uniform as they line up in the strong winds.