The twilight's first gloaming

In the comments to my previous post, I mentioned that I don't know of any words other than "predawn" for the period of time between first light and sunrise, whereas there are a number of words for the period right after sunset, including twilight, dusk, and, as holyoutlaw mentioned, gloaming, which is a word I first encountered in Donaldson's clenched Thomas Covenant books.

Meanwhile, numbat said that when he worked the night shift, he enjoyed the opportunity to see "the magnificent early morning skies." Here in Seattle, this is the part of the year when I see more magnificent early morning skies than normal, because the shorter days mean that I head off to work right around sunrise. I particularly love the Maxwell Parrish skies that are a cool, steady, translucent gradation of silver to infinite indigo still speckled with stars, and I love the loud, lurid, Technicolor coral-orange skies of flame.

My favorite magnificent early morning sky remains one I saw once when walking home from my girlfriend's apartment in Wallingford twenty years ago. As I groggily crossed an open field in a park, I looked up and saw a cloud stretched from one end of the sky to the other. A crescent moon hung above the cloud, and the sun was still just over the horizon below, so the cloud was lit silver on top with moonlight and gold underneath from the first rays of sunlight. All this in an otherwise clear sky of pale, pearly grey-green. It seemed as though I had stepped out into morning on an alien planet where everything was more painfully beautiful than on Earth.

Perhaps magnificent early morning skies are meant to compensate for having to be awake at such a godawful hour.