Sunsets of Melbourne

I was walking home from the university this evening and noticed the pretty sunset performance. Straight ahead along the road was the city centre, with tall, occasionally majestic buildings sheathed in glass and aluminium. The upper halves of these buildings were illuminated yellow by the setting sun, as if they had each been recently drizzled with a generous ladle of thick, golden and overly sweet syrup.

Melbourne had always been generous with the sunrise and sunset light shows. I attribute this to the generally low humidity found here, reducing the moisture in the atmosphere that might absorb any light. The sunset colours progress from yellow to orange, sometimes even to an intense shade or orange-pink, illuminating progressively higher parts of buildings, lower buildings blotting out the sun as the horizon races up to catch the sun.

When I got back home, the sun was still doing its thing, illuminating the outside in increasingly redder hues. Nearer to the time of sunset, I went outside my balcony for a good look. Over the western horizon, a slight sprinkling of clouds was doing wonders for the scenery. On various boundaries of these tufts of suspended water droplets, light was reflected and diffused, creating an amazing highlight of gold in a sky lit by yellow.

Here is a photograph from 31st of March 2004. Can you find the helicopter?

click to view large iamge

How convenient it would be if I had a digital camera. As a substitute, I used a few frames of photographic film in my trusted Olympus iS-1000.