Ten Minutes of Awesome Sky (and Fifty Minutes More)

As I said in my previous post (see below, July 24), sometimes you get only a short window of great sunrise light; other times, however, the sunrise just keeps going and going. This morning was one of the latter kind -- the color peaked in about 10 minutes, but the interesting view lasted for almost an hour.

The color started about 5:43a, which is about 20 minutes before official sunrise. Here's how it began:


Three minutes later (5:46a) it was warming up:


And the color began to spread (5:51a):


The peak of color arrived three minutes later (5:54a), still well before official sunrise:


Then it started to fade:

5:58a



6:02a


Ten minutes later (6:13a), the clouds had pretty much all gone to gray, but interesting patterns were beginning to form:



At 6:24a, the temperature dropped a couple of degrees, and the light fog that had been floating just at the surface of the water suddenly became a thin veil of fog 10 - 20 feet high (see especially the big cloud on the right side of the image):



The fog receded quickly, but the cloud patterns kept evolving (6:40a):



Just about an hour had passed since the initial glow. A few hours later the first wave of overcast from Hurricane Irene (still over 500 miles away) filled the sky.

If you would like to see the images above in a larger size, click on the following link:

Ten Minutes of Awesome Sky