Sunsets Ablaze

The day is ending and the shadows are becoming long. There is a calm in the air, a stillness. Your mind is suddenly cleared. You are fully in the moment. Time seems to slow right now. You can feel your heart beating and hear your breath. You turn and put your face towards the sky… it’s like you can feel the angels singing in some other realm… pure beauty…

Do you ever stand before a magical sunset in complete and utter awe? Watching the vibrant colors being painted across the sky on God’s great canvas. Can you feel the sacredness of the moment? The gift of intimate connection to the divine?

“Sunsets are so beautiful that they almost seem as if we were looking through the gates of heaven.”  - John Lubbock

“Never waste any amount of time doing anything important when there is a sunset outside that you should be sitting under.”  -C. JoyBell C.

Sunsets really are a daily spiritual moment. A gift waiting for you each and every day. There is something moving, sacred, and mystical about sunsets. A time to feel gratitude, intimacy, and connection. If you love beauty, you won’t ever miss a chance to pause, breathe, and gaze upon this transcendental moment. Being present and fully taking it in. Knowing that this exact pattern of color and light will never ever be perfectly replicated. Each sunset is unique and irreplaceable. Each sunset is an opportunity to appreciate the sheer beauty of nature’s artistry.

"A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder."  - Mary Balogh

These mesmerizing splashes of color that set the sky on fire, how do they actually appear? What makes each one unique and different from the day before? What is the actual science behind a magnificent sunset? Well, the colors that we see or do not see are the result of a scientific phenomenon called light scattering. There are small particles and molecules in the atmosphere, and when the light rays hit them they cause the rays to scatter. Let’s start with why we see the sky as blue. Shortwave blue and violet are scattered much more than other colors. So on a clear day both blue and violet reach our eyes easily. We don’t see violet very well so the sky then appears to us to be just blue.

Steven Ackerman, a professor of meteorology at UW-Madison explains the colors of the sunset in the following way: