Sydneysiders have been treated to two spectacular sights in less than 24 hours, with glorious pink and red hues sending social media into a photo-sharing frenzy on Monday night and early this morning.
But what causes the sky to morph into a blanket of fire? It's all to do with a process called scattering.
Scattering occurs when a beam of sunlight strikes a molecule in the atmosphere, which shoots some of the light's wavelengths in different directions.
Sunlight is made up of a spectrum of colours; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.
At sunrise or sunset, the path of sunlight through the atmosphere is much longer than during the middle of the day.
Because this lengthened path results in an increased amount of violet and blue light being scattered out of the beam, the light that you see early in the morning or late in the afternoon is visibly reddened, writes US meteorologist, Stephen Corfidi.
Monday's vivid sunset was the result of a patchy high cloud over Sydney, which Weatherzone's Rob Sharpe said was due to the jet stream.
"The jet stream is quite a long way up in the atmosphere and is what drives a lot of the weather patterns around the world," he said.
"It’s a belt of very strong winds in the upper atmosphere. When you’re travelling in a plane pilots like to get into the jet stream to get some extra support."
See more on how to take the perfect sunset or sunrise photo.
