Saturday’s sunset included a pillar of orange fire

It may be possible to watch a thousand sunsets and not see one like Saturday evening’s in Washington, which set the western sky ablaze and included a fiery column of orange light that reached upward from the horizon, long, narrow and brilliant.

Such blazing stripes, which seem to transform the circularity of the sun into an elongated shaft of flame, have been witnessed before. Although not an everyday sight, they have entered into the vocabulary of meteorologists and other sky watchers. They are called sun pillars.