Framed Sunset #3

I was getting ready to have dinner while in Emmett, Idaho, and notice the beautiful sunrise forming so I grabbed my canon and went outside to get the... more

by Robert Bales

Title

Framed Sunset #3

Artist

Robert Bales

Medium

Photograph - Photo

Description

I was getting ready to have dinner while in Emmett, Idaho, and notice the beautiful sunrise forming so I grabbed my canon and went outside to get the sunrise!

Air molecules and airborne particles scatter white sunlight as it passes through the Earth's atmosphere. This is done by a combination of Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering.[7]

As a ray of white sunlight travels through the atmosphere to an observer, some of the colors are scattered out of the beam by air molecules and airborne particles, changing the final color of the beam the viewer sees. Because the shorter wavelength components, such as blue and green, scatter more strongly, these colors are preferentially removed from the beam.[7]

At sunrise and sunset, when the path through the atmosphere is longer, the blue and green components are removed almost completely leaving the longer wavelength orange and red hues seen at those times. The remaining reddened sunlight can then be scattered by cloud droplets and other relatively large particles to light up the horizon red and orange.[8] The removal of the shorter wavelengths of light is due to Rayleigh scattering by air molecules and particles much smaller than the wavelength of visible light (less than 50 nm in diameter).[9][10] The scattering by cloud droplets and other particles with diameters comparable to or larger than the sunlight's wavelengths (more than 600 nm) is due to Mie scattering and is not strongly wavelength-dependent. Mie scattering is responsible for the light scattered by clouds, and also for the daytime halo of white light around the Sun (forward scattering of white light).[11][12][13]

Sunset colors are typically more brilliant than sunrise colors, because the evening air contains more particles than morning air.[7][8][10][13] Ash from volcanic eruptions, trapped within the troposphere, tends to mute sunset and sunrise colors, while volcanic ejecta that is instead lofted into the stratosphere (as thin clouds of tiny sulfuric acid droplets), can yield beautiful post-sunset colors called afterglows and pre-sunrise glows. A number of eruptions, including those of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 and Krakatoa in 1883, have produced sufficiently high stratospheric sulfuric acid clouds to yield remarkable sunset afterglows (and pre-sunrise glows) around the world. The high altitude clouds serve to reflect strongly reddened sunlight still striking the stratosphere after sunset, down to the surface.

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Uploaded

December 30th, 2021