Seattle Sun- Smoke filtered sunlight

[Carbon60]

A good friend of mine living in Seattle sent me this image of the Sun taken on an i-phone using only natural sunlight filtered through smokey skies from the unprecedented West Coast wild fires.

Seattle Sun.jpeg (477.64 KiB) Viewed 348 times

Stu.

[rsfoto]

Hi Stu,

That is incredible how far the smoke has already travelled.

[DeepSolar64]

I remember seeing the sun like this when we had a forest fire within 4 miles of my home two summers ago.

[Montana]

It is very sad to see this Stu but makes a super picture It seems from Spaceweather today that the smoke is getting very high into the atmosphere and can now be seen in Europe

Alexandra

[EGRAY_OBSERVATORY]

As Alexandra says, even in the Netherlands the effects of the smoke seems to have travelled.

Apparently Mount Wilson Observatory was at risk from the fires themselves...

Spaceweather.com says;- "The Bobcat Fire, which erupted on Sept. 6th in the Angeles National Forest, is out of control and threatening the historic observatory. On Tuesday afternoon, the blaze was within 500 feet of the facility. Firefighters saved it using a variety of tactics, including carving out lines by hand and with bulldozers, setting strategic backfires (indeed, the photo above might be a backfire), and dropping water from airplanes. After two harrowing nights of firefighting, the observatory still stands. unquote...

Terry

[Bob Yoesle]

Smoke filtering.jpg (67.86 KiB) Viewed 300 times

About seven days ago in eastern Washington State. Visibility about 800 meters. Then it got worse, for a few days visibility less than 400 meters, and no sun at all. We've had to wear an N95 mask for the smoke for the limited times we went outside (let alone Covid 19 exposure prevention when grocery shopping in town). With everything else going on, it truly felt apocalyptic.

Today there is some relief with improved visibility and rain in the forecast...

At the same time, it's been very dark at night. Two days after the picture above (Sept 13) a friend got the darkest reading ever on his dark sky meter, with zenith sky brightness below 23 m/arcsec^2:

Mckeag SQM Mosier OR.jpg (123.77 KiB) Viewed 300 times

"Our clear, moonless night sky ZSB is nominally about 21.7. Last night we reached that value soon after the start of astronomical dusk. ZSB continued to decrease until moonrise at 01:45, reaching darkest measurements of 23.02 mpsas. Following moonrise ZSB increased steadily, reaching 21.4 10 minutes after start of astronomical dawn."

Note the AQI inset in the graphic above - the Air Quality Index - was in the "hazardous" 400-500 range and above:

our_airq_idx_h.jpg.jpg (50.63 KiB) Viewed 300 times

[marktownley]

Cool pic! Reminds me when the storm in october? a couple of 3 years ago brought up Saharan dust to the UK and had a similar effect on the sun.