At around five in the afternoon yesterday, we noticed that the sky was color orange and posted a message on our Facebook page: “If you’re in QC right now, look at the sky! It’s orange!” Apparently, other parts of the Philippines had the same view.
Inquirer journalist Irene Andrea Perez posted the photo below, which captured how Makati looked around the same time. Another reader, Richard Macaraeg, posted the photo above from Baguio City. Reader Ivy Reyes messaged us, “In our Chemistry class before they said the orange thing is dust! Or if the sun is orangey also, it means polluted air.” There you have it: that thing of beauty was actually a sign of something disturbing, light pollution.
But when we asked someone whose knowledge of metereology compared to ours is godly, she said that “yes, colored skies are because of particles in the atmosphere, like dust or pollution, that cause the light to refract. We had the same thing last year when the sky turned a bright red. However, there’s no such thing as ‘light pollution’. The terminology is wrong.” We asked her if there was a term for this occurence. “Atmospheric optics.” Doesn’t sound as sensational as light pollution but, fine, we’ll stick to the facts. And just to be clear, “It’s not necessarily pollution. Water in the atmosphere which refracts is not necessarily pollution, neither is dust. There’s stardust, meteor dust, etc and these are not really pollutants in the sense of chemical particles from volcanoes or emission,” she added. For further reading, she gave this link to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US.
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Photos: In Baguio (topmost) by Richard Macaraeg and in Makati (above) by Irene Andrea Perez.
