Amazing Sunset

[pameladlloyd]

Tucson gets magnificent sunsets, but every once in a while we get one so extraordinary it's hard to believe. This evening, we had one of those. I managed to capture it on my cell phone, and while the quality isn't great, I'm going to share, because this is the kind of thing that's hard to believe.



Can you see the way the sky is divided, with one half blue and the other pinkish? It was far more spectacular and obvious seeing it directly and I really wish I'd had a better camera and a better place to stand; this was taken in my back yard, with the house and various landscapey things in the way. The sky was a paler blue to the South, and a rosier pink to the North.

Comments

Ooh!

[crinklequirk.livejournal.com]

http://spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=27&month=08&year=2008

I think you saw what we saw one sunset a couple of weeks ago: a vibrant ethereal pink column showing that you saw a volcanic sunset. Lucky you - ours was fantastic (and at first I thought maybe I FINALLY, definitively saw a noctilucent cloud sunset, darn it) and the camera was at home. And it was so fleeting, it was gone in the less than ten minutes home from the grocery store. *sigh*

Thanks for sharing this - it's so cool! :D

Re: Ooh!

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

What a cool link! :)

The colors were very much pastels, rather than the deep oranges mentioned in the article about volcanic sunsets. But, whatever it was, it was amazing to have the sky seemingly divided in half. That noctilucent cloud sunset sounds really neat; I'll have to keep an eye out.

You're very welcome, and thank you for sharing!

Re: Ooh!

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

That vertical division is most interesting. Normally you see horizontal bands. I'd been wondering about volcanic eruptions effecting sunsets too because around the time of that big eruption in Patagonia, we were getting sunsets like this. Not normal by any means but volcanic dust was responsible for the sunsets painted by Turner, apparently.

Of course we usually get too much cloud to be able to see any features in the atmosphere itself, also we're probably so far away from the eruptions that the dust is well disspated into the upper atmosphere.

Re: Ooh!

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

That's gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. I love the deep colors in that.

Sunsets are one of the things I really appreciate about living in the desert. But, as your picture demonstrates, beautiful sunsets occur every6where. It seems counter-intuitive that fewer clouds would produce better sunsets, since they form through the interplay of sunlight and clouds. I guess it's a matter of having just the right amount of cloud at just the right level of the atmosphere. Getting a really good photograph, otoh, is a matter of timing and photographic skill.