Sunbeam

A sunbeam, in the vocabulary of meteorological optics, is a beam of sunlight that appears to radiate outward from the position of the Sun as it shines through gaps in clouds or between objects such as mountains or buildings. The beams are in fact nearly parallel shafts of particle-scattered light separated by shadowed air, and their apparent convergence toward the Sun is a visual illusion of linear perspective, the same effect that makes parallel lines on a long straight road appear to meet at a distant vanishing point.