“It’s due to perspective. Parallel lines extending directly in the direction you’re facing will appear to converge at infinity. Think about standing between long, straight train tracks and looking at the horizon (the rails appear to converge). If a broad plain were covered with them, those rails would appear to converge at flatter and flatter angles as you looked to the left and right, hence building up “a cone-shaped structure” if you ignore everything but the rails themselves. Early computer-graphics raytraced images (here’s a so-so example) often had a flat, planar “floor” or “ground” plane tiled like a checkerboard, and you’ll see that the straight lines extending “away from you, into the distance,” do indeed converge as described. Somewhere on line, many years ago, I found an extremely detailed explanation of this phenomenon in terms of how the human eye (a spherical camera) works you could try looking for that. “
It’s just a perspective/distance thing. They’ll never be paralel due to the size of the sun in the sky. If we were closer to the sun or if the sun were larger in the sky, the rays would appear to be more paralel.
In those pictures it just appears like that because of the shape of the clouds and the gaps that allow sunlight through. It really has nothing to do with the parallelism of the sun’s rays because they are parallel upon reaching Earth, in these cases the light is obstructed by the clouds.
“It’s due to perspective. Parallel lines extending directly in the direction you’re facing will appear to converge at infinity. Think about standing between long, straight train tracks and looking at the horizon (the rails appear to converge). If a broad plain were covered with them, those rails would appear to converge at flatter and flatter angles as you looked to the left and right, hence building up “a cone-shaped structure” if you ignore everything but the rails themselves. Early computer-graphics raytraced images (here’s a so-so example) often had a flat, planar “floor” or “ground” plane tiled like a checkerboard, and you’ll see that the straight lines extending “away from you, into the distance,” do indeed converge as described. Somewhere on line, many years ago, I found an extremely detailed explanation of this phenomenon in terms of how the human eye (a spherical camera) works you could try looking for that. “
Refraction.
It’s just a perspective/distance thing. They’ll never be paralel due to the size of the sun in the sky. If we were closer to the sun or if the sun were larger in the sky, the rays would appear to be more paralel.
In those pictures it just appears like that because of the shape of the clouds and the gaps that allow sunlight through. It really has nothing to do with the parallelism of the sun’s rays because they are parallel upon reaching Earth, in these cases the light is obstructed by the clouds.