Huge appearing red sun this morning

Left the house 0600, headed for werk, in scattered fog that burned off by 0615 this morning.

Heading up 58E, as I approached Hampton Roads Exec Airport, I saw the sun breaking above the treeline and it looked like a huge cinnamon disc rising. If I wasn't driving I would have snapped a pic.

Here's the Scientific why of a red sun at dawn and dusk....

When sunlight strikes the earth's atmosphere, the blue part of the spectrum gets scattered by the air molecules (this is called Rayleigh Scattering). What happens is that the sunlight reacts with the air molecules, causing them to vibrate and give off or 're-emit' the light. The shorter the wavelength, the more the light reacts with the molecules. Because the blue wavelength is the shortest, it reacts much more with the molecules, whereas the red and yellow part of the spectrum tends to pass straight through. That is why the sky seems blue - what we see from the ground is the scattered blue light, which has been re-emitted by the air molecules. (A simpler, but not scientifically accurate way of thinking about it is that the blue light bounces around, eventually reaching us from all directions, whereas the red and yellow light comes straight through).

At sunset, the blue light has already been scattered away, and what we see is the remaining red and yellow light that passes straight through. Hence the sunset is shades of red and yellow. As the sun sets, the sky becomes redder; because the red wavelength reacts the least with the atmosphere.