Category Archives: Sunsets

Some sunrises

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We usually don’t get up early enough to see the actual sunrise, but sometimes I’ll look up while still lying in bed and see red or yellow light on the bedroom curtains. Then I get up and see what’s going on. These are the sunrises I managed to catch.

If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have curtains on the bedroom windows, at least no on the ones facing East. The hill falls away from the house on that side, and no one could possibly see into our bedroom.

But it’s not up to me. Leah insists on curtains. So we have curtains. And those curtains sometimes hide interesting things.

Sunset from the mall

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We went to our local mall Monday night. It was around 7:45 when we left, just in time to see the last red of sunset and the setting new moon.

I had to use my iPhone since I almost never have my camera with me. Unfortunately, for this purpose at least, the lens was far too wide to get what I wanted. I had to crop the image significantly to get this.

The brightest part of the sky also washed out the red.

Leah and I remarked on how red the sky was while we were driving back home. It made it very pretty, but the beauty belied the cause, which is dirty air. In this case, I suspect that much of what I call dirty air is really dirt, or dust, suspended in the air. It’s not particularly noticeable during the day, but when the sun’s rays have to travel through a lot of it, it tints the sky red.

We in the Southeast are under a high pressure area that tends to keep whatever happens to end up in the air suspended there. Atlanta has had air quality warnings lately, and I noticed my weather app showed one for us a couple of days ago.

We hope that a cold front that is supposed to come through next weekend will clear some of the pollution from the air, as well as bring in some slightly lower temperatures.

Fall skies

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Fall finally arrived, chasing our later summer away. The days have been mild, the nights cool, and the sky blue.

There was some humidity in the air Saturday morning when I walked the dogs down into Texas Valley.

Since our house faces east, we can see the sun rising, but not going down. But there are still some nice sunsets, even if we can’t actually see the sun setting.

It rained

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Saturday morning around 6 it started raining. There was lightning, thunder, strong wind, and heavy rain. I’m not sure how long it lasted, but by the time it ended we had about two-thirds of an inch of rain. When I checked our front yard, I did not admire what I saw. Where I had just finished seeding and trying to repair the erosion from earlier rain, I found more damage. It wasn’t terrible, but it was enough to convince me that I’m not going to make the yard perfect. This year, at least, there will be some washed out ruts with no grass. Plenty of time next spring and summer to try to fix that.

Along about sunset on Saturday we got another tenth of an inch or so. The strongest part of the storm missed us and continued south towards Atlanta. Leah looked out the window and pointed out the storm clouds.

These were towering thunderstorms. The entire storm stretched from Cartersville, around 25 miles away, nearly to the I-285 perimeter road around Atlanta, about 40 miles as the crow flies. It had to be a strong storm to push the tops of the clouds up into the sunlight when it was nearly dark here at home.

Yesterday we got no rain, but others not too far away did. Late in the afternoon it was raining over town, but not here. This is all we got.

The secondary bow is barely visible above the main rainbow.

Monday afternoon as we munched on “Mexican” food 10 miles or so from home, it poured for around 20 minutes, plenty of time to wash lots of topsoil and grass seed away, if it had been raining at home. But it only drizzled, at least by the time I sat down to write this post. There are still showers around, moving slowly to the south-southeast. We may get more.

Tuesday the forecast is for a 40-percent chance of rain. Again, we may get some. If not, I’ll have to sprinkle the grass seed and hope it survives. I will also need to water a bunch of juniper bushes neighbor John pulled up from his yard and gave to us. They were severely root bound, so they face more problems than just water. John also gave us three plants of unknown species, but maybe what’s called butterfly bushes. They were fairly mature, probably 12 feet tall, but they left most of their roots in the ground when they were pulled out. They were very wilted by evening Monday. I assess their chances as very poor, but I’ll put them out, water them, and hope for the best. Their blooms were attracting butterflies even as they lay in the back of the truck. It would be nice to have them somewhere in the yard.

Crepuscular rays from behind

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Leah called me out onto the front porch Tuesday evening right at sunset to see the sky. This is what we saw.

The Sun was setting directly behind us, near the horizon but high enough to illuminate the thunderstorm in the distance. Apparently there were some clouds between us and the Sun, and the shadows of those clouds spread across the entire sky.

Here’s a closer shot at the moon, the clouds and the sky.

The normal view of crepuscular rays is of bright, fan-shaped rays shining out from the Sun through gaps in the clouds. What these images show are the dark areas between the rays. “Normal” crepuscular rays are, as I said, fan shaped, with the narrow part near the Sun, getting wider as you look further from the Sun. These dark “rays” appear wider closer to us, the viewers, and the Sun behind our backs, and they get narrower as they go away from the position of the Sun. How can that be?

Well, my explanation is that the fan-shaped appearance of “normal” crepuscular rays is an optical illusion. The rays are nearly parallel, widening only a small amount. However, they look wider as they get closer to us, just like a road looks wider where your car is and narrower further away. The rays look like they are fan shaped because we tend to see the phenomenon as two-dimensional, as if the rays were pasted on the sky in the far distance. Instead, the rays are actually shining towards us.

This is what we see in these pictures; the rays have shot out from the Sun around the clouds and passed over our heads, disappearing into the distance in the east. Since the rays (or the darker areas between the rays) are very close to parallel, we see them as wider directly overhead and appearing to get narrower as they disappear into the distance. I am not sure I remember seeing this phenomenon before.

If we could have seen the entire dome of the sky, I think we would have seen crepuscular rays appearing narrow at the Sun, wider as they approach and pass over our heads, and then getting narrower again as they shine off into the distance. That would have been a sight.

These rays stayed visible for about a half an hour. I watched as the shadow of the Earth rose up on the bright cloud in the distance until the cloud was a barely-discernible gray mass on the horizon. I thought about the Sun moving towards the west and the shadow climbing up the cloud, and it occurred to me that the Sun was not, of course, moving; it was us. The surface of the Earth was flying at around 860 miles per hour around its axis, at the latitude where we live, carrying us and dragging the entire atmosphere along with it. So it was not the Sun that was moving, gradually hiding the clouds, but the clouds themselves that were retreating from the Sun.

Later Tuesday night that cloud (or one very like it) gave us a show as lightning flashed inside the cloud.