Monday, December 31, 2007
Why the Transition From Day to Night is Unlike Throwing a Switch
Here is a photo from space from a few years ago, from 211 miles up, which shows the terminator, the line where the sun no longer illuminates the Earth. It's not a clear line, but a fading of the light across a number of miles, a diffuse, gradual darkening. You can also see the reddened clouds to the right of the terminator; that's because there's more red light when it comes in flat through the 'soup' of the atmosphere. You can also see the diffuse blue light of the atmosphere, which does have a fine line ending it at the top of the stratosphere about 125,000 feet up. We can only breath in the first 35,000 of that. What a thin layer we inhabit between ground and the vacuum of space.
Labels: Science; Twilight
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 8:40 AM 
