photo #4516882

At the end of a day spent snorkelling, four friends enjoyed the sunset from Drawaqa Island, Fiji. ‘As the minutes passed, the sunset became more and more like a crown,’ recalled Lee FitzGerald (Cloud Appreciation Society Member 50,400), who shared this photo taken by her friend Mark Kubik. Stratocumulus castellanus clouds appeared in silhouette low on the horizon. Their distinctive jagged tops of this form of Stratocumulus resemble the turrets and crenellations of castle walls. The nearer clouds simply shaded the South Pacific Ocean below, and the further ones cast long shadows with their turrets in the evening light. These beams of light and shade are called crepuscular rays after the Latin for ‘twilight’, which is the time of day when they look most dramatic. A Sun that is low in the sky or over the horizon, as it was that evening in Fiji, can cast cloud shadows that fan out due to the effect of perspective as they stretch across the sky. It is a twilight tiara of radiant gold worn only briefly to mark the transition between day and night.