Crepuscular rays over Plymouth Sound , UK Crepuscular rays as seen from space, illustrating their parallel nature

Crepuscular rays (more commonly known as sunbeams, sun rays, splintered light, or god rays), in meteorological optics, are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from the point in the sky where the Sun is located. Shining through openings in clouds (particularly stratocumulus[citation needed]) or between other objects such as mountains, these columns of sunlit scattering particles are separated by darker shadowed volumes. Despite seeming to converge toward the light source, the rays are essentially parallel shafts of sunlit and shadowed particles. Their apparent convergence is a visual illusion from linear perspective. This illusion is the same as railway lines' or long hallways' appearing to converge at a distant vanishing point.[1][2][3]

The scattering particles that make crepuscular rays visible can be air molecules or particulates.[4]