Bi-cirrus Diunrnal Instantiation with Variable Altitude
I had a meeting in NYC today, and since hotels are so wicked expensive I just did a day trip. Of course that meant I had to get up before 4 am to get ready and catch a 5:45am flight.
The nice thing about flights this early is that they’re usually very light and you can catch the sunrise from thirty thousand feet.
Sunrise this trip was spectacular. We were flying between two layers of clouds, and occasionally through a few clouds that were wandering around inbetween the layers. As dawn began we passed through a particularly dense set of clouds. Through my window I could see an horizontal smudge of orange, and as we passed out of the cloud the smudge brightened and widened. Once through the smudge became a sort of window framed by the cloud layers above and below and some other clouds to the left and right. It deepened into red on its edges and as sunrise neared the inner edges tended more and more toward yellow.
The inner clear area was almost green because of the mixing of yellow with the blue of the sky. Through the lower layer of cloud you could glimpse the disk of the sun which was a reddish orange. We started descending and the lost site of the sun, but regained our view of the actual horizon. Now we got to see the sun rise over an unobstructed horizon. As it crested the horizon the area near it was etched in bright yellow. The etching spread visibly and then finally the stab of light came as the edge of the sun came into vew.
It was a thing of rare beauty; the timing of the plane’s route and the cloud cover was really amazing now that I think about it more. It’s probably something I’ll never see again, though I’ll certainly remember it!
