Location Taken: Pennsylvania
Time Taken: May 2007
It’s amazing how just a little bit of cloud can change everything about how we see the sun.
Perhaps my favorite example is what I call rainbow weather. Making a rainbow requires a delicate balance of light, cloud, and rain. The clouds must be patchy enough to let the sun through, but thick enough to produce rain. And the sun must be at a certain angle, usually lower in the sky, so it can reflect off of the water droplets in just the right way to split the light into a prismatic display.
Even when you’re inside the storm, away from those ideal angles, there’s something special going on. The sky becomes an odd color, the gray of the clouds mixing with the reds and yellows of the sunlight. In normal storms, there’s too many clouds between the sun and ground, and it blurs out fully. And of course, if there’s no clouds, there’s nothing blocking the light. But rainbow weather has that odd halfway look.
It’s most noticeable when you look at the sun. The edges blur, but enough light gets through to turn the center of the glow a brilliant white. It no longer looks like the ordinary ball of too-bright light that we see every day. The sun becomes more than it is, becomes what inspires so many stories and myths. The essence of the light of the sky.
