A Favorite Sunset

One of the joys of being outdoors daily is witnessing ephemeral sky phenomena like crystalline sun dogs, rainbowed lunar halos, long-tailed shooting stars, the rare aurora borealis, geese flying across the moon,…, and of course sunrises and sunsets. One of my favorite sunsets unfolded about 15 years ago, created by a large cloud that boiled up out of the eastern horizon so quickly that I wondered whether the Burlington ammunition factory had exploded. Its color began in pale pastels…delicate pinks, gauzy mauves, and dilute watercolors. But as the sun slipped further into the western horizon, the colors intensified to a dense reddish orange, resembling glowing coals against the darkening indigo sky. And like spent embers of your campfire, they faded to ash gray before disappearing in the darkness. The water in the foreground shadows is our home pond in western Johnson County. We are fortunate here, on the prairie-forest ecotone, to have both intimate woodlands and big-sky landscapes.

If this photo looks sorta familiar, it might be because half of it was featured on the front cover of your Bur Oak Land Trust Heritage environmental journal, January 2013. I thought you might want to see the whole panorama.

Many of nature’s phenomena are very ephemeral, and you have to be at the right place at the right time. Susan Spears is always on the lookout for great photos for social media promotion for Bur Oak Land Trust, and she could use our help by all of us getting outdoors a little more often and taking interesting photos. Email them to susan@buroaklandtrust.org.