This is a shot of one of the strangest things I've ever seen. I went up over the back side of Casper Mountain to Muddy Mountain to get away from city lights in hopes of capturing some meteor photos during the tail end of the Perseids this past August. I saw a few, but captured nothing decent. My time spent shooting was somewhat spooky with various noises (presumably from unseen wild animals) coming from various directions and a cold breeze making things a bit uncomfortable.

Finally, about 04:30, I headed back toward home. As I drove down the mountain, I rounded the corner from which one can catch their first sight of the town of Casper and I noticed that the city was gone!

I drove on down to "Lookout Point" and parked to get a better view. With the car's headlights off and my eyes adjusting to the dark, this is the sight that I was met with. It turns out that a layer of fog had developed below my location (at about 7,100 feet) but above the city (at about 5200 feet).

With a very long exposure (a bit over three minutes) at ISO 800, the eerie glow of the city's lights can be seen illuminating the cloud layer from below. The various colors are from areas of town using different types of streetlights. The colors in the shot are natural with the saturation actually at "-1" whatever that means :)

As I drove down from there, I passed through a layer of fog so dense that driving was quite dangerous with visibility being only a matter of feet ahead of the car. Once down below the bank, however, the town appeared perfectly normal and from there you'd have never realized that anything was strange at all. It just looked like normal cloudcover from below.

I was glad the town hadn't been swallowed up or vanished! But it was a creepy end to an eerie night alone.