October 10, 2025
Why Houston’s sunsets look like cotton candy — and the best places to watch them
Look up at the sky, y’all. Have you noticed the trick Houston likes to pull on us every evening?
Just as we’re ready to curse the city for being sticky, muggy and smoggy, it throws us a sky that looks like a painting, with fiery oranges that melt into deep blues mixed with cotton candy pinks and purples.
A friend I met at the University of Houston recently asked me, “Why are our sunsets so good … scientifically?”
Well, McK, here’s the gag: Those breathtaking sunsets are brought to you by the very things Houstonians complain about most — humidity and pollution.
Think of them as those two dudes at the party who everybody knows but nobody really likes. Who even invited them?
They’re hogging the booze and potato chips, talking way too loud, and you wish they’d get up and go. But then one of them gets on AUX, the other starts queuing some bangers (that’s young-folk speak for ‘really good songs’), and suddenly everyone is asking the freshly anointed DJs for a link to their playlist.
You don’t want to thank them (because we can’t forget how suffocating they are), but, for this one night, you have to.
Why the sky looks like cotton candy
Houston Chronicle meteorologist Justin Ballard, who watches and writes about Houston’s skies for a living, explained it simply.
Humidity scatters light. When there’s a lot of moisture hanging around, sunlight refracts and diffuses as if it were hitting a wall of tiny prisms.
“What you wind up seeing is sunsets that look almost kind of like watercolors,” Ballard told me. “You’ve got pinks and purples that look brushed onto the sky.”
Add in our signature pollution, lying like a soft blanket in the lower atmosphere over Houston, and the colors get even richer. Industrial and vehicle pollution scatter more blue light, Ballard said, enhancing oranges and reds in a sunset. Dust (in Houston, that’s usually of the Saharan variety) and smoke absorb blue light, giving us deep, muted reds and brown hues.
When the seasons change
Every so often, a cold front blows through like a bouncer, kicking humidity and pollution, those two pesky party crashers, out and southward.
Crisper, cleaner air is left behind.
“You’ll likely see, if you look straight up, shades of dark blue as the sun’s setting,” Ballard said of this scenario. “And then if you look directly ahead where the sun is setting, you’ll see something that looks really bright orange or even red, much more fiery.”
We might get an example of it Friday night, Ballard said, after a mild front moves in during the day.
As for the rest of the fall and winter, except for earlier sunsets, don’t expect too much of a difference.
“It’s not like once that first cold front comes in we won’t see watercolor sunsets again until April,” Ballard said. “We’ll still see them, just more sporadically.”
And what about the clouds
I don’t care if you’re tired of my party metaphor. In this analogy, clouds are kind of like the speakers.
Cirrus clouds (those wispy ones way up in the sky) are basically perfect reflectors, Ballard explained. They catch the sunset and bounce it back to us in bright pinks and purples.
“They’re completely made of ice, so they’re able to make for a really stunning sort of sunset,” he said.
Lower, thicker clouds instead block out the sun, muting colors and making everything look gray.
Where to watch the sunset in Houston
I can’t help but constantly look up. That’s why I have a “sky chat” with my friends in which we send pretty photos of the clouds almost daily.
With that being said, here are my favorite spots to watch the Houston sunset:
Memorial Park
Specifically, the West Lawn atop the Kinder Land Bridge.
It’s not the highest vantage point in the city, but it might be the most wholesome.
Every night, run clubs, businesspeople on bikes, picnicking families with babies and reporters trying to get the perfect time-lapse for their story assignment gather atop this man-made hill overlooking Memorial Drive for one of the best views Houston has to offer. There’s even a marker on the ground pointing directly toward the sunset, in case you couldn’t tell where it was.
Eleanor Tinsley Park
Hear me out on this one. You won’t get the best view of the sunset in the west, but if you face east, the way our closest star reflects off of downtown Houston’s glass towers at that hour is mesmerizing.
Literally any parking garage over 5 stories tall
Parking garages are monuments to our society’s hubris. How could we love our gas guzzlers so much that we build entire high-rises just to store them?
Their top floors make for great skywatching, though, and we all know that in Houston, we have plenty of them.
So take your pick, face west, and take your pics. And when you’re done, please email me your sunset photos. Please.
 | Jhair Romero, Houston Explained Host |
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