No, this isn’t the “All Sunsets, All the Time” blog. In fact, if I’d known that the sky was going to be so spectacular tonight, I wouldn’t have hiked myself silly for the sunset yesterday (see below)!

I left work late again tonight. Yeah, I know…it’s a disorder. But as I left, I noticed that the gray sky was remarkably colorful to the west. In fact, I pulled over and took a couple of pictures from east of the “big hill” before coming into town. I was surprised that the color stayed in the sky so long…long enough, in fact, for me to go up to the top of Hillside Park. That’s where I got these photos.

I took a bunch, but these are my favorite two. This is from the more vivid part of the sunset, before the light began to wane. As always, I’d like to stress that this is straight out of the camera. It was resized, but not retouched. I didn’t brighten it, darken it, or add more color to it. This is God’s work…ain’t it something?

I think the spectacular sunsets of November come from the shallow angle of the sun in relation to the horizon. I don’t know all the technical jargon, but that’s my primitive understanding. Much of the color comes from the light bouncing off the distant horizon, hitting the clouds over us. Once it begins to pass completely past that distant horizon, the colors start to shrink away from us:

Here you can see some of the purple easing into the clouds as the reds retreat. I stood, shivering, atop the water tower and watched as the colors bled from the clouds (I know it’s underground…I still call it a water tower). The harsh red light narrowed at the edge of the visible world, and it wasn’t long before the sun was gone…no doubt giving a remarkable red sunset view to someone in the Mountain Time Zone. That’s okay…I got mine.