It was a nice morning, and I thought it would be a good choice for me to sit in my backyard and read a book. But it’s easy for me to get distracted, and soon I was really interested in a spot of light that was on my chair:

I wondered what made this spot and I turned around to see how sunlight was coming through this tree behind me:

What I think is really amazing is how all of these leaves and the gaps between them are different shapes, but the light coming through makes circles. I used a white notecard to find more of them:

You’ve probably seen spots like this before, maybe without even knowing it. (Once you start to see them in a few places, you might have a hard time not seeing them!) Sometimes under a tree we say that there’s “dappled light,” but it doesn’t matter what you call it. There are funny shapes and a kind of light that photographers and artists like, all made by the overlapping circles of light like this.

Can you find circles of light like this in other places? What do you think makes these circles? Why are there so many? Are there other ways to make these sunshine spots? Could these circles be a picture of something else?