The Sun is a roaring thermonuclear furnace some ninety-three million miles away, casually fusing six hundred million tons of hydrogen into helium every second to keep the entire solar system from freezing into a solid block of cosmic despair.
Here, it is being used primarily to back-light a Victorian pleasure pier.
A pier is a uniquely peculiar piece of civil engineering. Having spent thousands of years discovering that standing on dry land was far preferable to drowning in the sea, mankind eventually decided that what it really needed was a way to walk three hundred yards directly out over the water, buy a tub of lukewarm cockles, play a 2p penny-drop machine, and then walk straight back again.
In this photograph, the local star begins its descent toward the horizon, casting an undeniable golden glow across a completely empty stretch of tidal mud.
The composition is nearly perfect, which is deeply suspicious for a casual snap. The water is polite. The sand is doing its best impression of a polished dining table. Yet behind the tranquil majesty of the evening light lies an inevitable, biological certainty: within twenty minutes, the temperature will drop by four degrees, the wind will shift slightly to the east, and someone will remark that they really should have brought a cardigan.