Friday, September 2, 2016

Our Beautiful World - Sunlight

We sat on the balcony a couple of weeks ago, listening to the concert at the dock across the street and marveling at the pattern in the sky.  It was like the rays of the sun except that the sun was behind us. It went from this.............


to this.  And it really was weird.  I wondered how that happened and heard from a friend across the country that she had seen something similar recently.  


So as I was checking the weather . com this week, I took a quick look at their photos posted from their current photography contest and someone had entered a photo with the same phenomenon.  Only that person knew what it was called - anti crepuscular rays.    

"Anti crepuscular rays or anti solar rays are similar to crepuscular rays, but seen opposite the sun in the sky. Anti crepuscular rays are near-parallel, but appear to converge at the anti solar point because of linear perspective. Anti crepuscular rays are most frequently visible near sunrise or sunset."

Maybe it's the KOOK in me, but I get a kick out of learning about odd things like that.

Tonight, there was evidence of crepuscular rays at the solar point of the sunset.  


I added some sun rays to the card I recently made for a friend's one-year-old grandson.  (Yes, that's supposed to be a giraffe, but I think the snout looks more like a pig's.  Oh well - he's one and probably will not notice.)


Since the theme for Our Beautiful World this week is sunlight, I thought I'd add some of my favorite sunset pictures from this summer.





Including the next two taken tonight, September 2nd.  A week ago the weathermen were forecasting a stellar 4-day weekend, but that forecast gradually fell apart during the week as hurricane season has promised to impact us in one way or another.  



We're headed back inland tomorrow as coastal flooding and high winds are part of the prediction. This is Hurricane Hermine I'm talking about which just passed over Florida and will shoot up the east coast and is expected to stall off the Jersey coast.  I hope that our coastline does not take a heavy battering. And I hope that everyone is safe.

Drop by Our Beautiful World to check out some beautiful sunlight-themed pictures from around the world.


3 comments:

  1. Amazing sunsets! Thank you for sharing at OBW.

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  2. Beautiful photo's Lorraine! I too have some photo's of those anti Crepuscular rays in my stash of photo's somewhere! Aren't they amazing to see! Thanks for letting us all know what they are called!
    Hope the Hurricane is kind to you:-)
    Sunshine, New Zealand
    www.ihearttostamp.blogspot.com

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  3. What glorious sunsets, Lorraine - thank you for sharing them! My favourite of all is the third one down in the sunset collection, with the deep pink that is almost magenta, and a splash of violet. But they are all beautiful. You're so lucky to be able to see them over water, it makes such a difference I think.
    I think I do remember reading about the rays when I was looking up the sun dogs in my weather book...the third ray photo is amazing. It looks like an oil painting.

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