EarthShadow, Owens Valley, CA

In honor of Earth Day, I’m posting one of my favorite images of a phenomenon that I watch for – EarthShadow.

Most people when looking at the above image will immediately appreciate the gradations of color from the earth to the sky. I look at this and see the blue as the shadow of the earth, with the last rays of the sun grazing the atmosphere above that. The colors shift from purple to reddish-orange, to yellowish-gray, finally blending with the darker grayish blues.

This image was captured in the fall of 2014, at a campsite near a hot spring known as Wild Willy’s. The white area in the foreground is a dry lake bed, the mountains in the background are the White Mountains, home to the long-lived Bristlecone Pines which live at elevations above 10,000 feet. The earth shadow here is cast by the Sierras.

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