All brilliant, but not so brilliant as the one I saw last week on the way to Melbourne from Los Angeles.
Qantas flight 94 left LA at 1120pm on a Wednesday. The big A380 took off, heading west, chasing the already set sun, but would never catch up with it. It's a 15 hour flight to Melbourne on a very large plane with about 600 passengers aboard. After about 12 hours, the sun lapped the earth, and came up from behind us. Sunrise from 38000 feet is a bit different,
It started with a vague light that wasn't moonlight, more like coming from below. There was a good moon out that night and lots of stars were still visible. What startled me was when the sun started to rise it only created some narrow bands of color; orange and yellow color located near the horizon. The net effect, which is where the real celestial brilliance occurred was in seeing the full spectrum of sunrise all the way thru to night,
I could see the indigo blue sky, compete with constellations (like the southern cross:) bright and visible, faded into a pink then orange band of sunrise, emanating from the sun as it moves across the ocean we were crossing.
Eventually, I could see day arising and night retreating in one view.
To see a sunrise is amazing enough. But to see one where, in one view, you can see the sun rising and the night retreating, framed by the deep indigo blue of the upper atmosphere, on top of the curvature of the earth is something hard to describe. It looked surreal, almost fake...but I couldn't look away.
Eventually, the sun overtook the moonlight and the starlight and illuminated the clouds below in a bright white, and drowned out any stars still visible. It was day time, and it had snuck up on us.
No comments:
Post a Comment