Guilty pleasures from Colorado

Posted at 2:10 PM on September 7, 2010 by Bob Collins (0 Comments)

The Fourmile Canyon fire in Colorado is the latest disaster to provide opportunities for beautiful imagery.

Fires make for great sunset pictures hundreds of miles away. Why? Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog explains:

The smoke is made up of tiny particles of soot and ash. When blue light hits them, it scatters like a pinball off a bumper. So when you look to the Sun through the smoke, all the blue light has bounced off in a different direction, leaving only the redder light able to make its way straight to your eye. This happens on a lesser scale every night with particles in the air, making sunsets red. But this fire has really strengthened the effect, and the Sun went through myriad shades of red on its way down past the mountains last night. It was astonishing. Making it even more wrenching was knowing what was a causing it, and that there were people in the middle of all that smoke trying to put the fires out.

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