CNN  — 

People in Florida have been watching the skies as Hurricane Dorian lumbered toward the US East Coast and last night they got a bit of a surprise – a purple sunset.

Amy Pope-Latham watched the sky turn to a beautiful, vibrant purple on Wednesday from her balcony in Jacksonville, Florida.

Amy Pope-Latham says she watched on Wednesday as the sky outside her Jacksonville apartment transformed from gray clouds to a burnt orange to a “beautiful violet that continued to become even more vibrant as minutes passed.”

“I live in Jacksonville and we stayed indoors all day, constantly checking on the forecast to see where Dorian was,” she said.

Hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamian islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama and is blamed for at least 20 deaths. It is moving slowly toward the Carolina coast.

Berivan Keskin was cooking dinner for her family when she noticed the skies start to change.

She’s lived in Jacksonville for about two years and has never been through a hurricane before.

Her home wasn’t damaged and she said the sunset was very beautiful.

Floridians flooded social media with pictures of the phenomenon, which sometimes happens after a hurricane.

Dispersion of sunlight by air molecules is why the daytime sky is blue. Scientists call this scattering, a term used to describe the redirection of light by small particles.

The low-level clouds from Dorian scattered the light in such a long wavelength that the cameras picked up the violet color.

Floridians flooded social media with pictures of the phenomenon, which often happens after hurricanes.

Pope-Latham said she’d never seen anything like it and it left her in awe of nature’s power.

“The sky was definitely a pleasant reminder that we must have hope and if we only believe in the sun when it’s shining we will never get through the night,” she said.

CNN meteorologist Judson Jones contributed to this report.