11,000 is Enough

Remembering I was an air traffic controller (a profession intently interested in weather)…

As I was looking at the weather report this morning, I noted (to my Facebook-weather-report friends) that I wasn't sure an 11,000 foot ceiling was high enough for the Sun to get under it and light up the sky. Turns out, it is.

I could see just a sliver of clear sky on the horizon this morning when I first got to the lake, one hour before official sunrise.  I really wasn't sure how the timing would work out.  The clouds were moving east, towards the sunrise and would, sooner or later, block it.  About 45 minutes before sunrise you could see the glow start.  (It was so dark at the time the autofocus wouldn't lock up but I tried anyway.)  The best color was to the right of my view of the lake so I had to walk down the face of the dam to get this shot.  

This was taken at 7:21 — just 7 minutes before official sunrise, during what I call the encore. There's often a pretty glow, early,  that fades away.  And then, just before sunrise, an intense but short burst of color.  It works (in reverse) for sunsets too.  I've seen many, many people (including photographers) walk away from a great sunset because the early color faded and they thought it was over. 

Nikon D7000 -- Nikon 18-300mm 6.3 ED VR

18mm

F8@1/15th

(BOB_4306)

©Don Brown 2019