Sunset over Nanticoke, August 6, 2005

Every once in a while Nanticoke is treated to a truly spectacular sunset. Last Saturday was one of those times. The clouds looked like glowing embers, and the sky was shades of blue I don't have words for yet.

These photos were taken with my Nikon Coolpix 4100 digital camera. I must have felt at the time that the colors in this first photo were not entirely accurate, because I changed the setting on my camera from "Sunrise/Sunset" to "Dusk/Dawn." (This was technically correct, since the sun was actually below the horizon as I took these photos.)

So are these colors more accurate? Honestly, I don't know. Sitting here now, it seems to me that the colors are artificially rich. Maybe the "Dusk/Dawn" setting on my camera does something to the color saturation curves. The human eye does something similar in low-light conditions, and a photographer using a film camera would have probably chosen ISO 400 film and made some changes to the exposure settings. Is this cheating? I don't know. But I checked each photo as I took it, and I apparently was satisfied with what I was getting. And I can assure you that no further processing was done to these photos on my computer (other than to shrink them down to a postable size.)

The sunset reflected in the front window of my house.

Another view of the western sky from my front yard. This picture was taken about three minutes after the first one.

The view from my back yard, looking past my house. This is my usual location for observing Mercury (which, when it appears in the evenings, can sometimes be seen in the vicinity of the telephone pole and distant rooftops, hiding among the utility wires.)

The same view as in the previous shot, but zoomed-in (using the camera, not the computer.) Note the corner of the roof and the telephone pole, seen in the lower left of the previous photo.

I'd like to thank Rima and everyone else who encouraged me to get off my duff and get myself a digital camera. No chemicals were used in getting these photos from my camera to your eyes.