Red Sky Glow by reflected Dawning

In the morning of January 24, 2015, I noticed that the sky was covered with low clouds, except for a small gap right above the southeastern horizon, where the sun would rise about 20 minutes later. So I expected a wonderful dawning, but nothing happened. But at 8.10 a. m., I noticed a strange red light coming from the west. When looking out of the southward window, I saw the western and southwestern sky glowing in a dark red colour.

During the following minutes, the red glow slowly extended eastward and became more and more intense. At last it was so intense that even the ground took this colour, giving that morning a quite eerie mood. In the picture taken in northeasterly direction (2) you can see this reflex on the ground, especially on the gravel path and the pedestrian crossing at the lower left. And the picture also shows that towards the east the low clouds still had their normal dark grey colour. In the southeast, no trace of a normal dawning was visible, but higher in the sky there was also this strange red glow from above. (3) This is vice versa to the normal course of a dawning, where the red colour spreads from east to west.

During the next 5 minutes, the light from above became even brighter and turned into a more orange colour (4). At 8.25 a. m., just before sunrise, a bit of sunlight reached the lower surface of the low cloud layer, but it was by far not as intense as the glow coming from above (5).

Author: Peter Krämer, Bochum, Germany

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