Sailing Home

by Kathy Bassett

Title

Sailing Home

Artist

Kathy Bassett

Medium

Photograph - Photography - Digital Fine Art

Description

Getting some fresh air, I happened upon this parade of ships going out for a perfect evening sail. People were literally running from their cars to get the their boats. It was a delightful evening. Working a bit with various plug ins and textures, I have enjoyed creating some moods in the tryptic-style variations of this sailing time. * **********Image is meant to soften at edges and top of photo to lend atmosphere. **************
Pure sunlight is white in color, containing a spectrum of colors from violet to red. When sunlight interacts with atmospheric particles much smaller than the wavelength of visible light, a phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering occurs. In this process, light is scattered in various directions, with shorter wavelengths (violet, blue, and green) being scattered more strongly than longer ones (orange and red).Because of this effect, the Sun generally appears yellow when observed on Earth, since some of the shorter wavelengths are scattered into the surrounding sky. This also makes the sky appear increasingly blue farther away from the Sun. During sunrise and sunset, the longer path through the atmosphere results in the removal of even more violet and blue light from the direct rays, leaving weak intensities of orange to red light in the sky near the SunMie scattering by larger particlesThe intense reds and peach colors in brilliant sunrises come from Mie scattering by atmospheric dust and aerosols, like the water droplets that make up clouds. We only see these intense reds and peach colors at sunrise and sunset, because it takes the long pathlengths of sunrise and sunset through a lot of air for Rayleigh scattering to deplete the violets and blues from the direct rays. The remaining reddened sunlight can then be scattered by cloud droplets and other relatively large particles to light up the horizon red and orange. These larger particles, with sizes comparable to and longer than the wavelength of light, scatter light by mechanisms treated by the Mie theory.
Mie scattering does not depend heavily on wavelength, but it has the largest effect when an observer views the light directly (such as toward the Sun), rather than looking in other directions. Mie scattering is responsible for the light scattered by clouds, and also for the daytime halo of white light around the Sun (forward scattering of white light).
Without Mie scattering at sunset and sunrise, the sky along the horizon has only a dull-reddish appearance, while the rest of the sky remains mostly blue and sometimes green.Ash from volcanic eruptions, trapped within the troposphere, tends to mute sunset and sunrise colors, whereas volcanic ejecta lofted into the stratosphere (as thin clouds of tiny sulfuric acid droplets) can yield beautiful post-sunset colors called afterglows and pre-sunrise glows.

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July 10th, 2015

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