What causes this?

jeffmeyers

I captured these images in Iowa a few days ago. I was traveling home and pulled off on a side road to catch the sunset. It was a nice, normal and beautiful sunset. But after the sun actually set there was this shaft of sunlight that rose straight up from the horizon. It lasted about 15 minutes. The colors and clouds kept changing but the shaft of light remained in the same place. Does anyone know what causes this? The clouds were changing to rapidly to think that it was a break in the clouds somewhere over the horizon. It stayed in the same place, as I said, for 15 minutes. There are no mountains in Iowa (duh), so why this shaft of light?

aj986s

My guess is that as the sun was dipping below the horizon, there was coincidentally a hole in the clouds that happened to be in just the right spot to create the shaft of light, like a single god-ray, but going up instead because of the sun's low position.

Very cool pics!

jeffmeyers

aj986s wrote:

My guess is that as the sun was dipping below the horizon, there was coincidentally a hole in the clouds that happened to be in just the right spot to create the shaft of light, like a single god-ray, but going up instead because of the sun's low position.

Yeah, I guess that is possible, but the problem is that the clouds were moving and the light shaft remained in place for at least 15 minutes.

hawkeye978

I'm wondering if it's similar to something I saw in Maine over the summer.



Here the sunlight was just skimming along the bottom of the clouds to form horizontal shafts. This cloud bank just kept going overhead from the horizon so the light headed out towards the viewer. I wonder if your clouds that were at the right altitude stopped farther away rather than continuing overhead.

Tango

reflection from a body of water would be my guess....

or this beam is linked to area51

Awais Yaqub

Great

ian408

Clearly this is the portal to the alien ship. It lasts for 15 minutes because that's what it takes to teleport the test subjects

Seriously, I suspect it's clouds below the horizon that cause this. Be a great question for the Weather Channel people though. And the photograph is nice.