Mom gave him a look that was all sunbeams.

On a frigid Wednesday afternoon, sunbeams poured into Maurice Sendak’s studio in Ridgefield, Conn., crisscrossing one another with the precision and warmth of the children’s books that were born in this room.

A sunbeam spotlighted the rise and fall of his white belly.

As Voyager 1 raced past Neptune on its way out of the Solar System, it turned its cameras back towards Earth and photographed a tiny speck, gleaming in a sunbeam.

When car exhaust and refinery hydrocarbons, which we had aplenty, are bombarded by sunbeams — voila— we get ozone, a principal ingredient in smog.