Red Sky At Night Sailors Delight
by Kathy White
Title
Red Sky At Night Sailors Delight
Artist
Kathy White
Medium
Photograph - Photography--greeting Cards Or Notes Are Cheaper By The Dozen!
Description
My husband,David, took this gorgeous sunset photo during a recent camping trip with his son on Father's Day. It was after there had been storms for about a week. Fortunately for them, the weather got somewhat better so that they could enjoy their camping trip.
When I saw this photo I was just wowed! The colors were so vivid, bright, and reddish orange! I had to do a little research....and this is what I found. I found it very interesting. Note--remember it was after a few storms.
"What makes a good sunset happen? I guess it depends on how you define "good," but I'm going to assume you mean a strikingly colorful one, where the colors are spectrally pure�say, vivid orange or red�as opposed to a more muted palette. Keep in mind that what we see with our human eyes is just a tiny part of the electromagnetic radiation that's given off by the sun. That radiation contains a wide spectrum of wavelengths, but your eyes are only sensitive to certain parts of it: the so-called visible wavelengths. Different colors are associated with different wavelengths. And depending on what happened to the light before it got to you, some of those visible wavelengths don't even reach your eye. Portions of it are absorbed and filtered out in the atmosphere. So really, there's a good sunset every night; we just can't always see it from the ground.
What about the saying: "Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky in morning, sailors take warning." Any scientific truth to that? Absolutely. Those spectrally pure colors are telling you there's a sizable swath of clear air off to your west that's likely to be over you the next day.
Why are sunsets sometimes more dramatic after a major storm? There's often a slanting band of clouds on the back side of the departing weather system, and that can act as a sort of projection screen for the low-sun colors, better than a horizontal band would. The slant means it captures more of the orange and red light, and if the cloud is thin enough, it will reflect those colors down to you. Also, storms wash a lot of the big particles out of the air."
In my searching, I also found that this saying is similar to something Jesus said in the Bible in Matthew 16:2b--3, Jesus says:
When it is evening, you say, "It will be fair weather; for the sky is red."
And in the morning, "It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening."
Hence, the title of his photograph, "Red Sky At Night Sailors Delight"...The saying is very old and quite likely to have been passed on by word of mouth for some time before it was ever written down. The beauty in this particular photograph is not only the sky, but he was able to photograph that beautiful array of colors also reflecting on the lake there, just as the sun was disappearing on the horizon.
Uploaded
July 11th, 2015
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