Volcanic Sunsets Light Up The Sky

This is one topic that I really wanted to blog about during the past month, but I didn't get a chance to because of the Hurricanes. During late August, I started noticing spectacular, and strange, sunsets here in State College, Pennsylvania, home of AccuWeather HQ [Google Map]. According to SpaceWeather.com, this was the result of the explosion of the Kasatochi Volcano in Alaska. The ash eventually made its way south and east to provide these spectacular colors and rays at, and after sunset.

UPDATE: Here's the "double sunset" video that I talked about below.

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For the sunsets that I had the pleasure of photographing, the best were August 23, August 25 and August 26th.

MY PICS FROM AUGUST 23RD (SEE ALL)

MY PICS FROM AUGUST 25TH (SEE ALL)

MY PICS FROM AUGUST 26TH (SEE ALL)

But the StarDot NetCam AccuCam picked up many more of them, each night between August 20th and the 26th. The first night included the bizarre "double" sunset shown above, which appeared to have a second burst of light after the sun had gone beyond the horizon. rate or comment on that video on our Photo Gallery.

Although I can't be sure that the "second sunset" wasn't exaggerated by the camera's attempt to adjust the brightness, local observers here reported something similar and also confirmed the bizarre rays and shadows high up above the horizon. Here are some stills from that evening - from approximately 8 PM to 8:30 PM:

I'll upload more AccuCam shots and animations this weekend.

Of course it wasn't limited to here in State College. There were over 350 photos tagged "sunset" between mid-August and mid-September uploaded to the AccuWeather.com Photo Gallery (by blog readers like you!), many of which were volcano-related.

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