Wildfire Smoke at Sunset

A stream of thick smoke from Oregon wildfires blotted out the sun today

Late afternoon, the skies started to darken and turn brown. The sun was red, and I know that we were getting smoke from a forest fire. A check of satellite photos shows that the source was hundreds of miles south of us, in western Oregon where a big fire is burning.

The smoke gradually shifted westward, and the result at sunset was what you see above. Shot with Sony α1 and Canon 85mm lens. This is a (slightly misaligned, hand-held) panorama, three shots while sweeping right to left without a tripod—this whole scene was changing rapidly, I opted for the best shot I could get with the equipment I had at ‘hand’.

Here is a wider view of the scene, shot with a 20mm lens:

And here is what the sun looked like for a few hours, shot with the 70-200mm zoom:

At one point, the sun disappeared completely, but 10 minutes later it was back but not very bright.

The smoke still lingered long after sunset, illuminated from below by city lights to our west. The east was clear, and the smoke is staying at elevation and not giving us seriously bad air quality. At least not so far.

I thought we might make it through fire season without Big Smoke, but it was not to be. Parting shot: a close-up of the most interesting mix of smoke and clouds near sunset.