This time is also ideal for full moon viewing and photography during its rising and setting. The western sky will be illuminated with orange-red while the eastern sky remains blue and indigo. In general, the low angle and long travel time through the atmosphere cause the light from the Sun during the time before and after sunset to be soft, diffused, and with little contrast, creating a warm color temperature and glowing effect without strong shadows or harsh lighting. During civil twilight, the Sun is at most 6 degrees below the horizon, meaning the upper atmosphere reflects the sunlight, illuminating the lower atmosphere, and bathing the sky in golden and reddish colors. Twilights in general have a tinting effect on color, often pushing to cooler blues and decreasing in power. After the sun sets, its light shines evenly, helping to minimize and eliminate shadows. During the time around sunset, the shadows are long and distinct. When the Sun is directly overhead, the shadow is minimal, practically disappearing if you are at the equator, but the shadows lengthen as the angle stretches with the Sun’s movement across the sky. Shadows are also impacted in addition to color as they are related to the location and angle of the light. The more atmosphere the light travels through, the redder the sunrise or sunset appears and high levels of air pollution will cause more vibrant sunrises and sunsets as well. The blues are scattered before the light reaches you, meaning the longer orange and red wavelengths reach your eye and reduce the light’s color temperature, creating the typical sunset colors. When the Sun is just above the horizon at sunrise or sunset, its rays hit the Earth at a low angle and have to travel through more of the atmosphere before they reach us, encountering particles including gas molecules, dust, and water droplets which filters the light, dimming it and adding more indirect light which softens contours and reduces contrast. The Sun is directly overhead at midday meaning the light has only a short distance to travel through the atmosphere, but the angle changes as the day progresses, increasing the distance the light has to travel through the atmosphere. The scattering occurs most in shorter wavelengths meaning that since the light carries far more blue light than violet (since it is scattered), the sky appears blue. If the particle is bigger than the wavelength (such as dust particles), the light is scattered evenly, but primarily forward, and all of the colors in the visible spectrum are scattered equally in contrast with the previous two where blue was scattered more than longer wavelengths. If the particle is roughly equal in size to the wavelength (such as smoke particles), the scattering is less pronounced. If the particle is smaller than the wavelength (such as nitrogen and oxygen molecules), the light is scattered in all directions, known as Rayleigh Scattering which causes shadows on sunny days to have a cooler tone. These effects on the light will be determined by how big the particle is to the wavelength. While this radiation travels consistently through the imperfect vacuum of space, molecules will affect it such as when it passes through our atmosphere, scattering the light in random directions. The Sun releases radiation of varying wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum from longer wavelengths including radio, microwaves and infrared to our visible spectrum starting with red and moving through to violet (ROYGBIV) as well as shorter wavelengths including ultraviolet, x-rays, and gamma rays. When discussing light, what we see is only one section of the radiation emitted. There are actually three stages of dusk that occur at the end of the three phases of evening twilight: While dusk colloquially means the transition from day to night or even broadly as the evening twilight hours, it has a precise scientific definition related to the solar elevation level, or where the Sun is in the sky in relation to the horizon. The process occurs in reverse in the evening from day to civil to nautical to astronomical and finally to night. In the morning we transition from Night to Astronomical twilight to Nautical Twilight to Civil Twilight with a dawn starting each phase and a dusk ending each. These occur in the morning and the evening in three separate phases. In general, we have dawn, dusk, and twilight to indicate the times when the Sun enters a new phase, throughout the phase, and at the end of a phase respectively. Outside of sunrise and sunset, what are these moments of transition? However, the transition between the two is not instantaneous, meaning that we have times when the light from the Sun is fading or rising. The Sun provides us with light creating the dichotomy of light and day. As the Earth rotates around on its axis, the Sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west.
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