The sunset with its reddish hues is a frequent subject of professional and amateur photographers, but also of painters. We know that the colors mentioned are caused by the Earth’s atmosphere when radiation is scattered by air molecules. The most significant dispersion is for the blue part of the spectrum, which is why the sky appears blue on a cloudless day. At sunset, however, solar radiation penetrates geometrically thicker layers of the atmosphere, the “blueing” is therefore more significant and the sky acquires a reddish hue.
TIP: The Perseverance rover captured a Martian solar eclipse
In 1976, a probe landed on Mars Viking 1 equipped with color cameras – and two years later, on June 14, 1978, thanks to it, we saw the sunset on a neighboring planet for the first time. The colors of the Martian sky are surprisingly inverted compared to Earth, and this is due to fine dust in the thin air envelope, which is the main factor responsible for scattering light there. Dust grains are much larger than air molecules, which is why the cloudless sky on the fourth planet has a yellow to orange hue. In contrast, twilight colors are a “poisonous” metallic gray-blue. Since Viking 1, other machines have captured the sunset on Mars, and in better quality, but the hues remain similar.
2023-08-18 23:59:16
#sunset #Mars #Earth
