Striped sunrises and the shadows they cast

Peter Lowenstein of Mutare, Zimbabwe – who recently contributed an interesting photo of straight lightning to these pages – has submitted another set of unusual photos for us. One is above, and the other is at the bottom of this post. The photos were taken a year apart, but might have been taken on the same day if two photographers had been standing back to back, one shooting a cloud-striped sunrise and the other shooting the sun’s first light – showing banded cloud shadow – shining on a nearby mountain slope. Peter wrote:

The first picture was taken almost a year ago from a high vantage point in the Bvumba Mountains looking east over Chikamba in Mozambique and shows a glorious sun striped by rising through thin layers of early morning cloud and mist on the horizon. I captured it at 5:57 a.m. using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ10 compact camera in sunset mode and x16 zoom setting.

The second picture was taken at sunrise yesterday morning (March 29, 2015) from the verandah of my house and shows alternate stripes of bright orange sunlight and the dark shadows of a thin strip of cloud and the eastern horizon being projected by the sun onto Murawa Mountain a few kilometers to the west. This spectacle lasted less than a minute before being faded by larger clouds passing in front of the sun. It was captured at 6:10 a.m. using a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ60 compact camera in sunset mode and x2 zoom setting.

Thank you, Peter! Interesting indeed.

Bottom line: Peter Lowenstein in Zimbabwe took these photos a year apart. One shows a sunrise striped with cloud, and the other shows cloud-striped sunrise’s cloud shadow.

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