Rural Sunsets

I believe rural sunsets are the best. Some say over the ocean they are spectacular but the sun setting behind the barn during harvest fall evening is my favorite.  I stand in awe of God's spectacular amazing power by looking at each sunset. Then when my son tells me he studied in science that there is a star that is so big it makes the sun look like a speck of dust, I'm even in more awe of His limitless power.  I thought, what makes a sunset look so incredible. Our maker, maker of us, the sun and the stars, makes them so incredible. We are so small, yet so important to HIS plan.  


Copernicus was the first to present to the world that the Earth is moving and the Sun is actually stays still yet it appears that the Sun is moving.  


Depending on the time of year, sunsets move. Clouds, pollution and lights from the city can all distort a sunset. 

WIKIPEDIA informed me: that locations north of the Arctic Circle and south of the Antarctic Circle experience no sunset or sunrise on at least one day of the year, when the polar day or the polar night persists continuously for 24 hours.

As a ray of white sunlight travels through the atmosphere to an observer, some of the colors are scattered out of the beam by air molecules and airborne particles, changing the final color of the beam the viewer sees. Because the shorter wavelength components, such as blue and green, scatter more strongly, these colors are preferentially removed from the beam. At sunrise and sunset, when the path through the atmosphere is longer, the blue and green components are removed almost completely, leaving the longer wavelength orange and red hues we see at those times. The remaining reddened sunlight can then be scattered by cloud droplets and other relatively large particles to light up the horizon red and orange.The removal of the shorter wavelengths of light is due to Rayleigh scattering by air molecules and particles much smaller than the wavelength of visible light (less than 50 nm in diameter).The scattering by cloud droplets and other particles with diameters comparable to or larger than the sunlight's wavelengths (> 600 nm) is due to Mie scattering and is not strongly wavelength-dependent. Mie scattering is responsible for the light scattered by clouds, and also for the daytime halo of white light around the Sun (forward scattering of white light). Without Mie scattering at sunset and sunrise, the sky along the horizon has only a dull-reddish appearance, while the rest of the sky remains mostly blue and sometimes green.Sunset colors are typically more brilliant than sunrise colors, because the evening air contains more particles than morning air.


I hope you stop and really look at the next sunset and say a prayer of thanks to the maker of the sunset.