Nice pictures K, but that air pollution is pretty bad. It reminds me of Beijing, where the sun set at about 30 degrees in the sky, on a perfectly blue, sunny day, due to the smog in the atmosphere. The sun literally disappeared into "thin" air, which was actually quite soupy with particulates, as is your first photo.
That was in the middle of winter, so the sun was over the southern hemisphere, and winter pollution is generally worse than summer.
Maybe that's pollution arriving with the prevailing winds, but given the amount of oil and stuff burned in the USA, I guess a lot of it is home-grown.
As you can see, tapeka.com and by having a look at Google images for sunsets in NZ, the air is so particulate free that the sun has to be down to the horizon to get the red going and the best colour is on the bottom of clouds, with not a lot of colour right on the horizon.
Fires from Australia sometimes provide a lot of particulates to make some very red skies at sunset.
Northern hemisphere sunlight is very thin gruel. That's why melanoma rates are so high among the melanin-deficient in Australasia, plus the cultural norm of sunbathing [which is not anywhere near as popular these days].
Mqurice |
