Distance has air. Far ridges turn paler and bluish-gray and the sky pales toward the horizon (summer haze up to 3.5 km). Clouds have lit tops and gray shaded bases where they were thin white puffs.
The midday picture is also about a stop brighter. In the valley where it was checked, sunlit meadows, granite and forest sit at the lightness of real photographs instead of a dim, murky version of them, and bright granite and clouds reach near-white without clipping. The cause was the camera’s midday darkening, set in October for brighter ground than the world has since, not the sky. The blue straight overhead is a little lighter and less heavy too, where it was a dark navy.
Still off: clouds are rounded puffs with no high thin cirrus, and cliff walls about 1 km away look much as before. Later checks found high granite slabs still darker than their photographs. A day the weather calls clear draws only a few small clouds since November 13, so pick a day with more cloud to see the shaded bases.
