| As someone who experienced the orange, this article doesn't do it justice. This was an extremely strange day. The air quality was decent relative to the past month of wildfires. The air felt and smelled like normal fog: cool and slightly wet. We've had days in past years and many recently where the smoke would make the sun a slightly warmer color, but it was always close enough to normal that you could compensate for it in your mind. September 9th was completely different. The world looked like a sepia-tone photograph. While the orange light was dimmer than normal, basically no blue light made it to the ground. You can't compensate for a complete lack of the higher wavelengths. When looking at the night sky, astronomers often illuminate their sky charts with red light so that their night vision isn't ruined. The same thing happened here, which made white lights extremely bright. And because the brain has some capacity to correct white balance, white lights were also blue. Being the only blue in the world, you could see all the places they were reflected. Blue was on a different layer from everything else. It was basically night by 4pm, but what surprised me most was that seeing blue was an emotional experience. You know those videos where they give a colorblind person those glasses that let them see what they've been missing? That's what seeing blue was like. It was like seeing ultraviolet. It almost made you cry. The only thing you could do was look up at the sky, and the only reaction you could have was emotional. There's a certain feeling you get when you know everyone has the same thing on their mind. It reminded me of 9/11: not as sad but just as pervasive. It was like every conversation was preceded by the unspoken lines, "The sky looks crazy today, doesn't it?" and "Never seen anything like it." For more pictures and reactions, this twitter thread does a good job: https://twitter.com/EricaJoy/status/1303711062512943105 |