September 18, 2024

Still Life With Buffaloberries and Sunset Light
Bozeman, Montana
2024

One of the very, very few pluses of the wildfire smoke we’ve experienced off and on for much of the summer is the tinted color of the sunlight, especially at sunrise and sunset. Given my druthers though, I’d forego those opportunities to see the world in a different light.

Speaking of altered lighting, this morning I saw the sun rise twice. The first time it was fully above the mountains on the horizon to the east of us, barely visible through some rather thick haze and smoke. Then, a few minutes later I looked out again and not only had the smoke more or less dissipated but the bright red disk of the sun was only sticking half way up behind the mountains. Baring some kind of mental hallucination, I can only attribute this to some unusually strong and fast changing refraction effect in the atmosphere. I know that refraction of light does occur at all times in the atmosphere and can be particularly strong at sunrise and sunset. But this is a rather extreme example, I suppose due to the amount of change in the density of the air when the smoke cleared away. I wished I had photos of the two suns–that would make a great POTD!