A View of Orange Skeletons.

I saw a strange sight this afternoon, one that I’ve seen only once before and I think I mentioned it on the blog. It goes like this:

The front of my house faces due west, and the back due east. This afternoon I looked out of the bathroom window which faces east and saw that all the still-naked trees in the hedgerows and on top of the hill had been painted orange.

In order for this to happen there has to be a particular set of circumstances. The atmosphere needs to be clear enough for the setting sun to retain its power, the western sky needs to be clear of clouds, and the atmospheric pressure has to be high enough for the refractive index to take out some of the lower wavelengths, but not too many. If it loses too much of the lower end the sun becomes a blood red disc with little brilliance, when it needs to be dark orange and blazing.

And so it was today. And so I stood enthralled by the sight of gold/green grass and numerous skeletal trees glowing orange. It really felt as though I’d entered a different world.

Then again, I suppose I might have done. Or maybe some farmer with nothing better to occupy his hands had painted them all orange, and then gone round ten minutes later and painted them all black again. You can never be sure, can you?