Strange sun today

We sometimes joke here about the "strange light in the sky", but today is really weird.
I didn't notice it at first myself, but some delivery drivers stopped as I was walking down to the shop and asked me what the strange thing in the sky behind me was! I actually had to think about it! There was a flat white disc obviously above the clouds that were scudding past, but it wasn't bright at all. We've got a bit of a storm coming through at the moment and I guess it must be a strange weather system with a lot of high consistent cloud that was taking the brightness out, but not completely obscuring the sun. It gave me the shivers!

someone else spotted it too

source (not my photo)
(edited to change photo link)
This photo is pretty good - here it was very clear, round and seemed closer than the sun does normally.

Looks like sun through smoke; wildfires or volcanoes blowing your way?

You could be right, although not close to us:
according to BBC weather presenter Dan Holley

Wildfire smoke from North America is turning the sky a rather eerie grey/brown colour this morning, having been brought across the Atlantic behind #StormAgnes

I didn't really notice the sky colour - it just looks like cloud to me, but apparently there is a lot of high level smoke which could account for it.

It looked just like that here as well. The lunch time news mentioned smoke from North American wildfires causing a haziness in the atmosphere or I wouldn't have thought twice about it.

Yeah. Living in wildfire country (i.e. poorly managed forest country), I can confirm that this is what the sun often looks like through late summer many more years than I'd like, just fighting to peek through the smoke. Terrible for lung health (you should make sure air quality isn't imperceptibly poor enough that you should don a mask), but I will admit that it can be welcome that time of year. Temperatures have started sneaking up to around 120F that time of year on clear days. The smoke helps shield us from that intensity of sunlight and keep the temperatures much more reasonable. Just gotta decide whether you want to cook to death or asphyxiate. 😂😭

Real story here. One year my mum went visiting my sister who lives in a big city. She took the train and kind of lost track of time. When she got out the station she told my sister the moon looked pretty bright tonight. My sis said "that's sunset!". Air pollution.

One of the things you can overlay in https://earth.nullschool.net/ is particulates. I haven't played with that much (I mostly use it for visualisations of aurora) but took a little snapshot and you can see the way the particulates have travelled across the Atlantic. I don't know what the "normal" is though. (I think the red areas over Africa may be mostly dust)

I remember back when all those wildfires were going out west, though the smoke wasn't directly in my area, one day the sun was about 20 degrees up but looked as if it were setting.