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!
That is a cool article you linked too. Not many people would believe you saw a sun rise twice without being in a galaxy on a planet far, far away. 😉
I was glad to see a reasonable and physics-based explanation for what I saw. Other explanations would most likely involve some possibly disparaging assessment of my mental state. 🙂 This isn’t the first time I’ve seen an odd phenomenon involving the sun. Some 50 years ago on a mostly cloudy day, I actually saw two suns at the same time, separated by about 5 degrees fairly low in the western sky. That could easily have been a similar kind of refraction incident, or back then, as opposed to now, it might well have said more about my mental state than about atmospheric conditions as I was likely at least slightly stoned, it being the early 70s and all.