Long Beach, Long Island, New York — as seen from 35,000 feet above:
If you were curious, those dark lines converging toward the horizon are the shadows of clouds and haze in the atmosphere, and are officially called anticrepuscular rays. A little nugget for everybody’s vocabulary…
EXIF:
Olympus E-M1, M.Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8 lens at 22mm
ISO 200, f/5.0, 1/800 sec.
Anti-solar rays (a.k.a. anti-crepuscular rays) seen from a jet window off the coast of Moloka’i, Hawaii:
Most of the time when I’m flying somewhere, I’m stuck in whatever seat I happened to be assigned. Â But every once in a while, I get lucky.
This was one of the very lucky times.
We took a family trip to Hawaii this past Thanksgiving (for non U.S. folks, it’s a harvest-related holiday in late November). Â One of the inter-island flights we were on happened to be very lightly filled — maybe one seat in 5 held a passenger. Â This meant, of course, that once we reached cruising altitude, I was free to move around and look for a good photo opportunity.
Since we took off just before sunset, and it had been a hazy / rainy afternoon, conditions were perfect for crepuscular rays. Â As it turned out, getting airborne made conditions even better for anti-crepuscular rays — in both cases, parallel rays of sunlight appear to converge thanks to the viewer’s perspective. Â In this case, the anti-solar point is just off the island of Moloka’i.