Sitting on the deck of our room in Albion provided a beautiful view across the Pacific as the sun was setting. As is usual with sunsets, you never knew exactly what you were going to get. One night it all looked quite promising but the cloud cover low on the horizon meant it all went dull rather than getting dramatic. On another evening, though, we had some high level clouds that started picking up the low evening light very nicely resulting in some great skies.
One evening the sun set in front of us with nothing much to obscure our view. While I was happy to be sitting on the deck watching it go down, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to grab some shots of it. A long lens meant some bigger views of it as the atmosphere distorted the view of its last gasps of west coast light. After that, someone else was getting the benefits.
The strange shapes the atmospheric distortion produces were really interesting to watch. The roundness was replaced by all sorts of shapes including one that looked more like a Mayan pyramid. It changed so often that I had to keep shooting. Only as it was almost done did I realize that I really should have been videoing this as well to show just how quickly it retreated below the horizon and how much it changed apparent shape while doing do. (As an aside, I do know that the refraction of the atmosphere means that I am seeing an image of the sun on the horizon when it has actually already fallen below the true sightlines.)
Having missed this video opportunity, I shall have to be ready to try that out in future. Meanwhile, I shall continue to enjoy the memory of the speed and rapid changes that the sun went through in the last moments of the day.
