RAINBOW SHERBET SUNSET

This sky did this for maybe twelve minutes. Long enough to set up at Yaquina Head with the lighthouse silhouetted against it, long enough to make several frames, long enough to watch the color shift through the spectrum and try to catch it at the moment when the most colors were visible at once.

The green is the part most people ask about. It is unusual at sunset and it is unusual on the Oregon Coast. What produces it is a specific atmospheric condition — high cirrus catching short-wavelength light at the same time that lower clouds are catching long-wavelength light. The result is a sky that runs through several distinct color bands simultaneously rather than transitioning through them in time. Most sunsets give you one color at a time. This one gave you all of them at once.

The name came easy. The first time I looked at the frame, I thought of rainbow sherbet — the cheap, half-melted kind from a deli case. I do not think that's a problem. The Oregon Coast did the work. I just had the camera up.