Did you see Earths shadow in the sky at sunset yesterday? I took these driving/facing east on I-10 in Houston with, of course, the sun setting in the west directly behind me. You can see rays of shadow being cast through a prismatic sky. There are no objects hanging around in the sky to cast those shadows onto the opposite horizon, so where do they come from? That shadow is being cast by the sphere of the Earth itself. As the sun appears to set down through the horizon, light creeps over the curvature of the earth casting a shadow under the sunlight. This is what it looks like when the Earths shadow is cast onto the sky and opposite horizon. See third photo for an visual aid. You can see this every night if the conditions are right, but usually they are not :( Additional factoid: though the sun may appear to be visible (actively setting), its actually already dipped below the horizon. It appears this way because it takes 8 minutes for the suns light to travel the ~92,000,000 miles to reach us, so we see the sun where it was 8 minutes ago.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 19:43:57 +0000
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