BTW… None of these photos has been photoshopped.
After thousands of years of an event that recurs 365 days each cycle with the regularity of a metronome, you might expect the repetition to have lost its allure. Yet when you amble along the boardwalks of LA, you’ll find crowds of people with their wine glasses and cocktails, huddled in winter and sprawled in summer, gazing rapturously at the fiery disc on the horizon.
And as it has every day of their lives, tonight the disc does the exact same thing it did yesterday. It widens and softens and turns from a sphere into a shrinking, effervescent blip, all the while throwing off a sensational light show into the clouds and streaks and celestial debris of the heavens. And then, after three brief types of twilight (civil, nautical, and astronomical) that have preoccupied the religious since ancient times, it quietly vanishes.
Interestingly—and a bit of science here—when you marvel at the sun easing over the yardarm, it has in fact already disappeared. What your eyes see is a product of refraction, the bending of light around the circumference of the Earth. Not that it matters, but when you say goodbye to the Lord of Day, he's already long gone.
So what makes the sunsets in LA so special? Billions of tiny particles in both space and the atmosphere absorb the blue and green components of normally white or yellowish light, leaving the orange and red hues to explode through the evening sky.
Industrial and civic pollution play their part, of course, and so do the massive forest fires that ravage the dry western United States every summer. But then every autumn, the Santa Anas--technically the Katabatics, or as we prefer, the Devil Winds—sweep through the mountain passes around the LA basin, saturating the air with desert erosion, driving humanity to do crazy, unmentionable deeds, and turning an already impressive light show into a sight for the ages.
So yes, the Big Picture might have its grimmer elements, but when you're sitting there on a beach in LA, sipping on your Cabernet Sauvignon, it's hard to escape the sense that the Lord has invited you personally and individually to his or her favorite private carnival.
Read all about sunsets at Wikipedia.
Read all about the the Winds that Make Men Crazy at Wikipedia.