Your camera lens is made of several pieces of glass. The glass is designed to admit as much light as possible on to the sensor, but at each layer, a small amount is reflected.
If the source light is bright enough, especially in comparison to the background, these reflections bounce around a bunch and eventually hit the sensor. Normally, any reflections are very faint and get washed out by the rest of the image, but the sun is like 1000x brighter than the sky, so even a weak reflection shows up.
My husband was telling me that sometimes it lines up just right through trees and you'll get thousands of little eclipses lol. Must be nice to have lots of trees. Stupid desert :(
Ooh, that's a classic! An inevitable happy accident on your behalf.
Shadows under tree canopies also create the same effect, a lot of little "pinhole cameras" between leaves.
I drilled a hole in a piece of scrap wood I had in my shop so my wife and I could observe it the only way we could with what we had on hand. Still cool as hell to see that in any form IRL.