Looking down on Long Beach

Long Beach, Long Island, New York — as seen from 35,000 feet above:

Looking down on Long Beach

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.

Point of focus

Anti-solar rays (a.k.a. anti-crepuscular rays) seen from a jet window off the coast of Moloka’i, Hawaii:

Point of focus

Most of the time when I’m flying somewhere, I’m stuck in whatever seat I happened to be assigned.  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).  One of the inter-island flights we were on happened to be very lightly filled — maybe one seat in 5 held a passenger.  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.  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.  In this case, the anti-solar point is just off the island of Moloka’i.