Sunset storm over Wellington, Nevada

Here's another image from sunset a couple of nights ago.

The camera is facing east, opposite the setting sun.  The sunset orange to blue color transition is called the "Belt of Venus".  As the sun sets in the west, the edge caused by the shadow of the earth rises in the east, with the warm light of sun on one side, and the shadow lit only by local scattered blue sky light.  That orange or pink over blue coloration is pretty common and consistent here, so perhaps it's more visible with the transition projecting onto our dusty air (especially down at Mono Lake where there tends to be a high concentration of ultra-fine dust).

Astronomer +Philip Plait describes the phenomenon on his Bad Astronomy blog:
Moon Rise over an Arsenic Lake
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/02/25/the_belt_of_venus_moon_rise_into_the_earth_s_shadow.html

Venus is one of the first things you can see as twilight comes.  It's also a planet that you see towards the sun, so if Venus is in the sky at all as twilight progresses, it's always towards the opposite horizon from this event named after it.

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