The Green Flash

If you enjoyed The Pirates of The Carribean movies, you've become aquainted with the green flash. The final movie fictionalized a real phenomena as movies do. I first learned of the green flash several years ago in a Reader's Digest. If one can see a clear unobstructed view of the sun rising or setting on a perfectly flat horizon in just the right conditions, as the colors of the spectrum pass under the flat horizon, between the yellow of the last sight of sun, and the blue of oncoming night, for a brief millisecond is an emerald green flash. Don't blink. I tried to see it whenever conditions seemed likely. The trouble is that there tends to be an obtrusive haze on the horizon, that obscures the view. I lucked out once though, counting me among the privileged. I was on a plane landing in Dallas at sunset. We were high enough for the horizon to appear perfectly flat, there was no hazy body of water, and I had a window seat. It was cool but brief.

Last summer we took a drive to the beach on Lake Erie. As the sun set I took the picture I worked from for this painting. Just after, the sun mutated, and disappeared into a black mist before meeting the horizon.