Constable sky…

I've often thought that some paintings look like photographs. Rarely have I noticed skies that
looked like paintings, but one evening in mid-November I was struck by how much this sky
seemed like a painting by the English artist John Constable (1776 -1837). Constable was an
amateur scientist as well as a professional painter; indeed, according to The Rainbow Bridge by
Raymond Lee, Jr. and Alistair Fraser (p.80), "As lovingly as he depicted and re-imagined the
landscape of his boyhood Suffolk, he also devoted much energy to painting English skies...[his]
cloud studies from the 1820's...are justly famous examples of artistic and meteorological
insight."The sunset sky depicted here is, like every sunset, unique, but is produced by similar
mechanisms each and every time: the refraction, absorption and scattering of low sunset rays
through a long path in the atmosphere, in which the shorter blue and green wavelengths are
absorbed or scattered out of the line of sight compared with the residual yellows and reds. The
absorption is due mainly to water vapor and ozone molecules, whereas the scattering is
predominantly caused by dust and aerosol particles that are smaller than the wavelengths of
visible light.