Dawn and sunrise on a clear, frosty morning can perform magic tricks. Here you see the first light to reach us yesterday, as sunbeams began poking over the ridge that is our eastern horizon. One of them mischievously lighted this Red Maple Tree like a torch.
“Dawn,” I learned recently, is when the sun is six degrees below the horizon, according to the National Institute of Standards. That’s when the sun casts enough light into the atmosphere to create a “twilight,” a word from Middle English for “second light” or “half-light.” “Sunrise” is when a physical part of the sun first becomes visible to us in the morning.
The sun is lowest relative to us in the morning and evening, when its light has to travel through more of the earth’s impure atmosphere to reach our eyes. That trip to us filters out much of the intense blue and ultraviolet color in the sunlight’s rainbow spectrum. We then see more of its yellow and red hues, colors that are said to be “softer” and “warmer.” In this case, maybe “hot” would be a better description.
(Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on October 10, 2022.)