Glorious sunrises worthy of painting by our greatest landscape artists lit up the town’s landscape this morning.
The gorgeous orange colours delighted readers who sent us pictures of their favourite sights.
Inevitably Castle Hill tends to figure in at least some of them but there were some featuring town centre locations too.
Resident weather expert Paul Stevens of Salendine Nook said: “We had a very lovely sky this morning with fantastic orange colours.”
How the human eye sees sunlight is a complex phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering which causes light from the sun to bounce off tiny particles in the atmosphere and scatter in different directions.
Sunlight boasts many different colours: from red, which has the longest wavelength of all visible light, through to violet at the blue end of the spectrum, which has the shortest wavelength.
The reason why we have a blue sky is due to this short wavelength.
Blue light is scattered more effectively than other colours, and this is why the sky normally appears blue to us.
But at sunrise or sunset, however, when the sun is low on the horizon, the light rays must pass through more of the atmosphere – and therefore bounce off more molecules – than at other times of day.
This means that more blue light gets scattered away before the light reaches your eyes.
Other colours – such as red, orange and yellow – can therefore continue to pass through the atmosphere unaffected, creating beautiful colours at the start and end of the day though it often seems that sunsets are that bit more vivid than sunrises.
And Paul has a warning that the mild weather of recent days may be about to be replaced by much chillier temperatures with the possibility that we might get snow showers at the start of next week.
