Pink clouds in Leuven?

You know how you sometimes see something so beautiful you begin questioning reality? Well, this was that for me. It is snow season in Belgium and I was out for a walk at sunrise and serendipitously walked into a desktop wallpaper. And I know it sounds silly, but the fact that this warm orange/pink cloudscape was immediately followed by snowfall made the experience even more magical.

And as any magician would say, it is not magic, it is physics. Well, I'm paraphrasing—I don't know many magicians—but out of curiosity I began reading about cloud iridescence and atmospheric scattering of light, and despite my aversion to physics, I actually find the science of this pink snow cloud fascinating.

In essence, at sunrise the light actually travels a longer distance through the layers of Earth's atmosphere to reach my eye, where the smaller wavelengths of colours like green and blue get scattered or redirected from following a straight path. On top of this, heavy clouds of snow right above me act as a thick blanket of moisture, which also absorb and scatter these colours from the sun. Ultimately, this leaves the longer wavelengths of light to pass right through and paint the town red. I guess Doja was talking about atmospheric scattering of light when she dropped that song.

It was almost unfair to only witness this for a couple of minutes before the dark grey clouds took over the sky, but I have little to complain about when there is so much snow animating everything around me. Even park benches and bridges look like they were sketched by an excellent artist or, much more amusingly, an expert AI prompt designer.

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If you also succumb to your whims and pick up a bouquet of flowers for your fiancé, join the club. I found this brilliant bundle of orange and decided to set up a vase at home because you can never have enough plant troubles in the world to evade getting more plants. My tips for successful longevity for any flower bouquet is to immediately chop off the bottom section of the stems which was exposed to the previous bucket of water. This allows the flowers to delay any potential decay as a healthier section of the stem is now open for work. As my vase has a thinner neck, I decided to also pluck away any additional leaves around the bottom half of the stems to allow them easy access into the vase. This also prevents the leaves from being exposed to the water and potentially rotting sooner. I put a cup worth of clean filtered water along with a few pinches of flower fertilizer. This is optional, and I have had success without it too, but since it is available to me, I do want to take ...

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