text: when the sun shines through gaps in cloudcover, why do the rays splay or radiate outward? when the sun's rays reach earth, they're essentially parallel.  and light doesn't bend (at least, not on the scale i'm referring to here). so when i look up at the sun shining through a hole in the cloudcover, how can it appear to be shining out from that point, going in all directions? the outward splaying is from perspective on your end, not on the sun's. it's true, the rays are almost parallel since they are coming from 93 million miles away, but you are probably only one or two miles away from the mean distance to the clouds. since the area covered by the speckled clouds is large compared to their distance from you, the pseudo-parallel light beams look like they are dramatically diverging. it's a very powerful illusion and i think it had a lot to do with early man's perception of the sun (and by extension, all celestial objects) as being much closer to earth than they really are.