6/1/2004: Green flash at sunrise

This Earth sci pic of the day shows an actual phenomenon - where the Sun's light, traveling through a lot of Earth atmosphere, gets "squashed" and separated until it looks like this. I can't remember ever seeing it this squished...

that is a beautiful shot. i'm sure there are evil rays of death (technical term) meant to cook our brains found with this phenomenon?

There are some other good photos at http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/GF/pictures.html

Didn't Henry Fonda talk about the green flash in, "On Golden Pond"?

<EM>> it looks like the red, orange, yellow, green part of</EM>

Well, that kinda makes sense to me. Given the curvature of the Earth, the sun's rays are hitting the atmosphere at different angles as you move up from the horizon, and since the different bands of the spectrum have different refractive indices, you'd be getting a different colour band being refracted towards the camera at the different angles.

So in other words, the Earth's atmosphere is basically acting as a giant prism (or lens, depending on how you look -- har, har -- at it) in this picture.