Striking photos show San Francisco caked in hazy, eerie orange sky

• The sky above San Francisco turned a hazy orange Wednesday morning as the region continues to battle a series of wildfires.
• The orange sky is a result of the smoke that has blown in from the fires, with smoke particles obscuring the sunlight.
• As a result, San Francisco looked as though it were still nighttime throughout Wednesday, with an eerie twilight fog blanketing the city.
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San Francisco residents awoke on Wednesday to discover a glowing orange sky.

Smoke from wildfires has been covering San Francisco for weeks, but the layer that blew in on Wednesday morning was much thicker. And as the day wore on, the sky took on a darker hue of orange, making life in the city at 11 a.m. feel like night time, with streetlights and car headlights beaming through the dark and eerie shadows stretching across the ground.

The all-day eclipse is due to a  series of Northern California wildfires that broke out in late August following a cluster of lightning storms and subsequent power outages. One of the wildfires, the SCU Lightning Complex, is currently 95% contained and has become one of the largest in California’s history. Firefighters continue to battle the blazes that have swept through this part of the state, including the fires that have begun more recently, like the fast-growing Creek Fire that has consumed over 160,000 acres so far.

The smoke in San Francisco on Wednesday sat above the fog, so air quality was not significantly worse despite a surreal sky that looked like something out of an Edvard Munch painting.

Here’s how the city looked in the eerie, apocalyptic-looking haze.