The green flash is kind of like Bigfoot or aliens. Some people swear they’ve seen them, while other laugh. And the ones that claim to have seen the green flash in real life? Well, they claim it’s magnificent. The ones that haven’t seen it put in the optical illusion category, which is not nearly as magnificent.
The phenomenon, like Bigfoot or aliens, has been talked about for hundreds of years. Jules Vernes claimed that if one were to look into the light of the green flash, they would gain the power to read the souls of anyone they met. There are even accounts of the green flash as far back as the Egyptians.
Jules Verne and the Egyptians, though, were stuck to talking about it. Thanks to Youtube, Instagram, and Eric Sterman, the proof is in the pudding. It’s a Hawaiian pudding. According to NASA on the Huffington Post, the green flash might happen because of the earth’s atmosphere:
Difficult to observe, the momentary green flash above the rising or setting sun has been documented as a phenomenon caused by the atmospheric bending or refraction of sunlight. Like a weak prism, the Earth’s atmosphere breaks white sunlight into colors, bending red colors slightly and green and blue colors through increasingly larger angles. When the sky is clear, a green flash just above the sun’s edge can sometimes be seen for a second or so, when the sun is close to a distant horizon.
Eric Sterman is a videographer from Hawaii who’s created a whole pile of non-sunset related and mind-blowing footage, like this, this, this, and this
