I don’t usually go in for pictures of sunsets. But the one last night seemed unusual, so I took a few pictures. If I had been serious about it, I would’ve used a tripod. As it turned out, most were blurry, as I adjusted the exposure downward and paradoxically ended up with a shutter speed of 1/6 s. One striking aspect of the sunset was the extent to which it blanketed the western sky. Also interesting were the gashes in the clouds—white luminous transient gaps in the slowly roiling waves. And the little dark scraps scudding by at a lower altitude.
On a nonvisual level, those who saw it were probably thinking of the previous day, when the temperature reached near 70°F, in contrast to the blustery conditions that followed—appropriate to the season, at long last. The sunset seemed to say: Wake up! It’s winter!
John Aravosis over at AMERICAblog took note as well. His photo is rather more dramatic, but I wonder whether he intensified it after the fact.* In any case, it was quite something—for DC, anyway. There’s seems to be something about our weather patterns, or something in our air, that makes flamboyant sunsets a rarity.
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*In the comments, he says he did not. That leaves other technical explanations for his deeper reds—different metering choices, different sensors, different image processing by the camera, etc.—in addition to ambient differences (location, time, etc.).
