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Peter Lowenstein
Mutare, Zimbabwe
01/31/2023
06:45 pm

Equipment Details:

Hand-held and tripod-mounted Panasonic Lumix DMC TZ60 and ZS40 in sunset and manual exposure modes

Post-processing Details:

Recovery from personal archives of 308 images of volcanic sunsets taken between 21 January 2022 and 31 January 2023 for size reduction and display as icons in Windows 10 folder. Scrolling 4K screen capture of icons using Faststone Capture to produce thumbnail icon montage.

Image Details:

Volcanic Sunsets, 21 Jan 2022 - 31 Jan 2023.
During the twelve months following the massive eruption of the Hunga-Tonga Volcano on 15th January 2022, 308 volcanic sunsets have been photographed from Mutare in Zimbabwe as shown in the accompanying thumbnail montage of the views obtained on every day when the weather was clear enough to either directly observe the post-sunset displays being produced by stratospheric aerosols from the eruption or reflections of these through partial cloud cover below. The displays include receding brightly coloured post-sunset volcanic twilight arches either alone or accompanied by radiating crepuscular rays. Early on these varied greatly in frequency and intensity and included gravity waves due to the patchy nature of the arriving volcanic aerosols but later evened out as they became more uniformly distributed in the stratosphere. That situation persisted for several months and it is only recently after almost a year that the volcanic sunsets are becoming less frequent and have diminished in intensity. As Mutare is at almost the same latitude as Hunga-Tonga it seems to have been a favoured location to observe the distant after effects of the mega-eruption and compile what must be a unique record of them. A video slideshow of all images in the montage (which can be viewed full-screen) has been posted at https://youtu.be/oXrrMkXVzFA

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