The scene was filled with beauty: the sun sending its brilliant rays

[GeneD]

The scene was filled with beauty. Such as the sun sending its brilliant rays to the earth and the leaves of various shades of red, yellow, and brown moving slowly in the wind.

I'm trying to do this exercise on sentence fragments. The task is to spot the incorrect sentences, and I've spotted the sentence above, but it's also interesting for me to try to correct it or, at least, to know the correct option(s). Could you help me with it, please? Here are my versions:

1. The scene was filled with beauty: the sun sending its brilliant rays to the earth and the leaves of various shades of red, yellow, and brown moving slowly in the wind.
2. The scene was filled with beauty: the sun was sending its brilliant rays to the earth and the leaves of various shades of red, yellow, and brown were moving slowly in the wind.
3. The scene was filled with beauty. The sun was sending its brilliant rays to the earth and the leaves of various shades of red, yellow, and brown were moving slowly in the wind.

The second version I like most, but I don't know if any of them is correct. What do you say?

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

You're right that the first line contains an incorrect frament. (Not all fragments are wrong.) The other three examples just seem to have different writing styles.

Number 2 is grammatical. Tell us why you chose it.

 

[GeneD]

I'll explain all the three versions I made.

Firstly, I wanted to use a colon instead of a period. (I don't really know why. It just seems to me logically (?) more flowing.) This explains my first two sentences. As I already said, the second I liked most. I think it just seemed to me the safest option because it had a full predicate (was sending, were moving).

On the other hand, the first example also looked somewhat right. I think I've seen something like this in Hemingway's writing. But I'm not sure.

The reason why I made up the third one is that I wasn't sure if a colon fits there. (I'd just use a colon writing in Russian and assumed that it might have worked in English.)

And I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Do you mean that all the three sentences I made are okay?