…the beauty of a sunset, in all of its varieties and variations, is only enhanced the more you know about it.
Sunsets
grab our eyes and our interest. They change colors, dominate the
horizon, and sometimes we even see a flash of green or blue, if we're
lucky. Sunsets even come with their own optical illusions. Cosmologist
Ethan Siegel explains why sunsets are so magical.
You
may not even realize it, but by time you’d see a sunset like the picture
above, the Sun has already technically set, it’s only due to the fact
that the atmosphere bends light that we’re still seeing it like this.
This
is why, if you time a sunset, it will take longer than the expected 120
seconds to go from the moment it touches the horizon to the moment it
dips below, even during the equinox at the equator, where it rises and
sets as close to completely vertical to the horizon as possible. The Sun
appears to linger due to the refraction of our atmosphere.
The explanation of this and other sunset phenomena comes with some awesome pictures at
Starts With A Bang.
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