Lost sky colors

[nancylebov]

When I was a kid (1960s in Delaware), there was a faint green band on the horizon. It was presumably pollution-- the sky is blue all the way down to the land now, and the only reason I can think of for the change is the laws requiring cleaner air.

The band was pretty, though, and so were the brilliant green "lakes" between the clouds at sunset. I haven't seen that for quite a while.

The other thing that might be lost is magenta-- *bright* pinkish purple that would show up late in some sunsets, and which I've also seen in Frazetta paintings, though I can't remember which ones offhand.

Has the sky changed in your lifetime?

If you saw a picture of a sunset with bright green in the sky, would you think someone was making it up?

How about other implausible skies? I remember a sunset with puffy, evenly pink clouds that went as high as I could look without tipping my head up. I certainly wouldn't have believed it in a picture.

Some of Gauguin's paintings have yellow "shadows" under the trees, and I'm told critics thought he was using arbitrary color for composition until someone realized it was fallen flower petals.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

There's a line in the song "Normandy" from Once Upon a Mattress: "There's a moment after the sunset / When the sky is suddenly green."

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that's a green flash (which I thought was just the top edge of the sun) or something else.

[whc.livejournal.com]

I've heard that there can be a green flash at sunset, especially over water and/or at lower latitudes.

[mindyklasky.livejournal.com]

I took a horrifically boring course in college that covered - among other things - American Landscape Painting of the Nineteenth Century. We studied numerous indistinguishable vast canvases, many of which had orange and/or pink fluorescent skies. I bristled at the art, because it was so unrealistic.

But I've now seen those skies a couple of dozen times - usually on dry spring or autumn days, when there are clouds low on the horizon.

::shrug::

I'm still not a fan of the 19th-century work!

[chomiji]

There was a period during the 19th c, immediately after the catastrophic eruption and subsequent destruction of Krakatoa, when sunsets were really wild because of the amount of particles thrown into the atmosphere. National Geographic's web site has a short article on the topic of this and other atmospheric factors than can make for odd sunsets.

[mindyklasky.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... I knew about the eruption, of course, and I've read about the effect on worldwide climate, but I'd never put the two together. Thanks for the additional insight!

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

In the middle to late 70s and early 80s I was part of the MIT Sunset watching club, an informal group of people that met at MITSFS and watched the gorgeous sunsets. The club died a quiet death as pollution lessened and the sunsets became less interesting.

[mrgoodwraith.livejournal.com]

There are numerous pictures among the archives of the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD) of weird glows in the sky and utterly unreal-looking cloud formations that the scientists who run APoD nonetheless assure us are not only real but have been occurred often enough that we (mostly) understand what causes them. (There was one picture -- of a huge hole in a cloud with empty sky behind it -- for which they said "We don't know why yet, but sometimes the bottom falls out of a cloud" -- but that's the exception rather than the rule.)

[dcseain.livejournal.com]

Yes, many pinks, fuschias and magentas have diminished or disappeared as the air has gotten less poluted. In exchange, there are now myriad shades of deep purple, and purer pinks in the East as the sun sets.

In my lifetime, the night sky has changed tons. My first astronomy class, in 1980 or 81 at the Woodbridge Campus of Northern VA Community College - the WS and WA buildings weren't there back then, we walked out to the tennis courts and observed the night sky of our ancestors: the Milky Way, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus, Mars, and the moon, Beta Centauri, all the stars of Ursae Major and Minor, and more.

Today, one can pick out Most of the Little Dipper, all of the Big Diipper, but not the Ursae anymore. The planets shine through still, but look lonely without their starry background. The white/orange/brown/yellow glow of the lights...sigh. :/

I tooo recall lost sunsets.

[wolfdancer.livejournal.com]

ones that ripeled like very lean bacon, and marbles with red and blue and green.

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Not sure I remember green as being part of a sunset. I did see magenta last night though -- serious magenta too. I was impressed. That doesn't happen often in the July smog of the FedroSplat. (We'd had showers and T-storms earlier in the day though. Must have cleared things up a little.)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Uniform bright orange, over New York City's East River. I think it was the actual sky, not the clouds.

However, the closest thing I've ever seen to a sky of "bright canary yellow" is the sickly chartreuse you sometimes get before a thunderstorm. I still wonder what Oscar Hammerstein was smoking at the time.

[(Anonymous)]

This book sounds relevant:
Light and color in the outdoors
Marcel Minnaert
recommended here:
http://blog.plover.com/addenda/200604.html