Just before you see the sun rise in the morning or just after it has set for you in the evening, try to work out where it is using clues in the land and sky.
This is good practice when you don’t need it and improves your awareness hugely for those times when you might.
The sun does not set or rise for all things in a landscape at the same moment. The higher something is then the earlier it will see sunrise and the later the sun will set for it.
I took this photo a couple of days ago. The sun had set for me, but if you look in the distance you’ll notice that it hasn’t set on the hill in the distance yet. Its light can be seen bouncing back off the bright yellow rapeseed field and some of the highest trees.
Now if you look a bit higher still and to the right of the picture, notice how the near-side of the bank of clouds is much brighter than the far side. But that is not true of the clouds in this picture.
The bright cloud on the right is slightly higher than the other clouds we can see and is catching the sun and this is true of a few of the other scattered cumulus clouds too. But many of the clouds are a dull shade and this is because they have cloud between them and the sun.
The art of reading sun direction from cloud reflections is both fun and challenging and can be practiced when the sun is still up. I find myself doing it in lots of very different situations, from the bottom of wooded valleys to working out which way an aircraft is flying when only able to look out of the windows on one side.
In this picture we are looking close to due east, with a western sun setting behind us.
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On a related, but different note:
It was a fun day today. I opened my post to find an advance copy of the Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues & Signs. I may be biased, but ooooooooh it’s a beauty!
