WOW! that’s an incredible display of crepuscular rays captured in the sky of Townsville, Australia on Sunset.
This one was most likely caused by thunderstorms west of Queensland and the setting sun below the horizon beaming between them. Awesome.
The present purple sunbeam is just insane… It builds up like a highway in the sky.
Sun rays are columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed regions. So now try to imagine the size of these storm clouds. There was just one crepuscular ray in the sky.
These sky phenomena mainly occur around dawn and dusk.
Crepuscular comes from the Latin word “crepusculum”, meaning twilight.
Also known as God rays, these rays of sunlight appear to radiate from the point in the sky where the sun is located.
When many sunlight beams are present, their apparent convergence is an optical illusion.
The rays are in fact near-parallel shafts of sunlight.
Here the Facebook post with some other purple pictures:
Wow what an incredible display of crepuscular rays captured from Townsville on Sunset! This one was most likely caused…
Posted by Higgins Storm Chasing on Wednesday, January 27, 2016
The name comes from their frequent occurrences during twilight hours (those ), when the contrasts between light and dark are the most obvious.
Sometimes you can even have a rainbow and a lightning with sunbeams.
