Yesterday evening, while photographing insects, spiders and various small details of the natural world, I noticed that the sun is obscured by a layer of something that looked like the usual humidity, that can happen in this period ... but there was an unusual aspect to that seemingly ordinary scene ...
... the sun was still relatively high in the sky ... and the thing definitely looked too dense, not like the mist I saw many times before.
Later, at home, a friend came for a visit and told me about the meteorological news she read on the Internet. Brought by the strong winds, the particles of desert sand from North Africa ended up high in the atmosphere above the Mediterranean Sea and the Balkans area ... creating this cool phenomenon.
As I mentioned before, I was concentrated on macro stuff. Things like this pair of diurnal Zygaena filipendulae moths were my priority. Only when I noticed the unusual disc of the sun, that looked like some new planet that entered the earth's orbit, I unmounted the macro lens and took a few shots of the overall atmosphere.
As the sun was going down, it completely disappeared in the dusty mist.
According to a prediction I read this morning, the phenomenon will reach its maximum on Thursday or Friday. I will surely spend plenty of time in the next days on the coastal meadows, observing the nature and the weather ... so, this is just a short overture about this topic that will be shown in more photographs in a longer post that will appear on Friday or Saturday ... maybe Sunday.
When I was photographing the sun last evening, some riders passed by ...
... the group of tourists looked pretty cool in that atmosphere ...
... and the horses raised a bit of dust as well ...
... while the summer bunch was riding along the sea.
One day before that, also in the evening, as the sun was going down ... the phenomenon was already visible, but it didn't look so unusual ... it was more like the sun disappearing behind a layer of clouds.
The moon is also getting full these days ...
... so when this photogenic atmosphere reaches the maximum, I'll have another cool disc in the sky, ready to be photographed through a layer of distant dust.
Yesterday I took only two more shots ... the wild garlic flowers ...
... and the last look at the moon, later in the evening, when it was higher in the sky.
As always in these posts on HIVE, the photographs are my work.