EarthSky Community Photos

Submit your photo here. Comment or upvote on photo pages. Search via photographers' names. More improvements coming! To help, please donate.

Caroline Haldeman
Flagstaff AZ
09/11/2019
06:40 pm

Equipment Details:

Canon Powershot SX 430 IS

Post-processing Details:

Added some saturation on my laptop using Photo Gallery.

Image Details:

Earth’s shadow
Just before sunset, a low, flat, dark blue band rises up from the eastern horizon. This is the earth’s shadow and it stretches for nearly 180°. It is bounded above by the pinkish antitwilight arch and below by the horizon. The earth’s shadow is best seen when the sky is clear and the line of sight is long. From a high elevation, the shadow appears sharper than it does from ground level.
The colors of the sunset result from a phenomenon called scattering, says Steven Ackerman, professor of meteorology at UW-Madison. Molecules and small particles in the atmosphere change the direction of light rays, causing them to scatter.
Scattering affects the color of light coming from the sky, but the details are determined by the wavelength of the light and the size of the particle. The short-wavelength blue and violet are scattered by molecules in the air much more than other colors of the spectrum. This is why blue and violet light reaches our eyes from all directions on a clear day. But because we can't see violet very well, the sky appears blue.
Scattering explains the colors of the sunrise and sunset.
The sky is pink and orange in the morning and evening colors are more pastel and pink in the East and West. On the other side of the sun, one can notice an amazing phenomenon is the arch anti twilight.
The anti twilight arch or anticrepuscular rays or the belt of Venus is the projection of the Earth's shadow on the lower layers of the atmosphere.
This phenomenon is visible to the naked eye, is seen at dusk in the east in the evening shortly after sunset in the west where the morning shortly before sunrise.