Shafts of Sunlight

Shafts of sunlight, sometimes mythologized as God rays, Ropes of Maui, Jacob's Ladder, or Fingers of God, are atmospheric optics known as crepuscular rays.

Crepuscular rays are shafts of sunlight that stream through gaps in atmospheric clouds.

The shafts appear to radiate from a point in the sky, but are are nearly parallel. The convergence to a point in the sky observed on the ground, is actually a perspective effect analogous to how parallel train rails appear to converge at a distance.

“When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.”
― Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)

Crepuscular is derived from the Latin word crepusculum meaning twilight. Crepuscular rays frequently appear during the high contrast twilight hours of dawn or dusk.

“The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it”
― Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

REFERENCES

• Crepuscular rays, Wikipedia.

Twilight

Following dawn and dusk, an earthly envelope of twilight fills us with emotions like hope and melancholy. Phases of sunlight move our circadian clock forward on the arrow of time.

When dawn surrenders to sunrise we are bathed in twilight.

“What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?”
― Margaret Atwood

That same twilight covers us from dusk until sunset. Twilight is refracted sunlight that reaches us after the sun slips below Earth's horizon.

Sunrise over the South Pacific Ocean
International Space Station, 5 May 2013

Categories of Twilight

Humans revel and take comfort in naming what we observe.

Naming lets us categorize and individuate experience. Thus we call out categories of twilight.

“Twilight drops her curtain down, and pins it with a star.”
― Lucy Maud Montgomery

Objectifying observations is the silhouette of reverence.


REFERENCES

• Twilight, Wikipedia.