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The time of dusk is the moment at the very end of astronomical twilight, just before the minimum brightness of the night sky sets in, or may be thought of as the darkest part of evening twilight. [4] However, technically, the three stages of dusk are as follows: At civil dusk, the center of the Sun's disc goes 6° below the horizon in the ...
Zodiacal light seen behind the Submillimeter Array from the summit of Mauna Kea. In the mid-latitudes, the zodiacal light is best observed in the western sky in the spring after the evening twilight has completely disappeared, or in the eastern sky in the autumn just before the morning twilight appears.
Sky brightness refers to the visual perception of the sky and how it scatters and diffuses light. The fact that the sky is not completely dark at night is easily visible. If light sources (e.g. the Moon and light pollution ) were removed from the night sky , only direct starlight would be visible.
Twilight occurs according to the solar elevation angle θ s, which is the position of the geometric center of the Sun relative to the horizon. There are three established and widely accepted subcategories of twilight: civil twilight (nearest the horizon), nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight (farthest from the horizon).
Crepuscular rays usually appear orange because the path through the atmosphere at dawn and dusk passes through up to 40 times as much air as rays from a high Sun at noon. Particles in the air scatter short-wavelength light (blue and green) through Rayleigh scattering much more strongly than longer-wavelength yellow and red light.
The night sky is the nighttime appearance of celestial objects like stars, planets, and the Moon, which are visible in a clear sky between sunset and sunrise, when the Sun is below the horizon. Natural light sources in a night sky include moonlight , starlight , and airglow , depending on location and timing.
Earth's shadow cast onto the atmosphere can be viewed during the "civil" stage of twilight, assuming the sky is clear and the horizon is relatively unobstructed. The shadow's fringe appears as a dark bluish to purplish band that stretches over 180° of the horizon [3] [4] opposite the Sun, i.e. in the eastern sky at dusk and in the western sky ...
The Bortle dark-sky scale (usually referred to as simply the Bortle scale) is a nine-level numeric scale that measures the night sky's brightness of a particular location. It quantifies the astronomical observability of celestial objects and the interference caused by light pollution .