Category Archives: Sunsets

It was like being inside of a giant neon tube, glowing everywhere with a bright, pink, fluorescent sheen.

With a six-day old Moon a bright white crescent up there – no pink tint for it!

The iPhone camera is good, but it can’t quite capture the depth of color that the eye saw!

It never gets old!

ALWAYS take a peek out around sunset!

When we went out for our hands-on, live ammunition handgun training yesterday, the shooting range was out in the middle of nowhere, a dozen miles or so north of town off of the major CA highway headed to the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Northern California.

It’s been HOT recently, triple digits mostly, so we pushed our class back from noon until 16:00, which in turn meant that it was after 18:00 when we got to the range. Facing downrange to the west, the Sun setting lit up the holes in the target like a Lite-Bright set, making it easy to see our results.

Once we were done, cleaning up and packing up, we had a great view of a whole lot of dirt, rock, tumbleweeds, Joshua trees, and mountains off in the distance with that classic desert sunset color gradient in the sky.

I, of course, took pictures to share. Because, DUH, like, have you even MET me?

It caught my eye through a side window, bright orange and pink stripes reflected off the car. I immediately went out in front and was not disappointed.

The colors were mind blowing!

And for about five minutes, they just kept getting more amazing and saturated.

But then, just before I thought, “Okay, that was great, but it’s over,” I realized that it wasn’t over at all.

The colors were starting to fade, but the contrasts between the greys and blacks and whites and the remaining pinks and oranges were fascinating.

And every moment brought out new textures as the angle to the setting Sun kept changing.

Then most everything was grey, but the different levels and layers of clouds started to be displayed in detail.

Something must have changed or shifted far over the horizon, because suddenly there was one final burst of color.

Perhaps not as vivid as at first, but with some interesting contrasts on display.

And even when that last burst of yellow light turned more toward the orange and red section of the spectrum, the shadows and details were amazing.

Again, it reminds me so much of a Michael Whelen painting, realizing of course that the sunset came first, Whelen is just a genius at translating that into paint.

From the first picture to the last took twenty-five minutes. There was a nice breeze and I was simply chilling in our front yard the whole time. It was relaxing, and god knows I can use that. (I suspect most of us can.)

The point I thought of out there and wanted to share was that you shouldn’t make the mistake of looking at the vivid phase of the sunset that lasts two or three minutes, figuring it’s over, and going back inside. Wait for it. Be patient. Be prepared to be surprised and delighted. There’s far more beauty than you might see in just five minutes if you can spend the extra twenty minutes.

Besides, when you get to the point where it’s dark and there’s no color left at all, the stars will be starting to come out. You can continue to sit there, enjoying the cool breeze, listening to the coyotes and the trains, and see the second half of the double header as well!