The Colour of the Moon by Day and by Night

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Scientific paper

CAN any of your readers give me a full explanation of the reason why the moon looks white by day and yellow by night? The light that proceeds from it is of course the same at both periods; whence does the change in appearance arise? Two reasons occur at first thought, but they do not completely satisfy the many requirements of the problem. The one is, that the light, being really somewhat yellow, though less so than it often appears to be, passes in daytime through an atmosphere made blue by the solar rays, and the blue and yellow neutralising each other, the moon looks white. The other reason is, that as the evening closes in, the twilight becomes purple, and the moon being but moderately yellow in itself, looks more intensely yellow by contrast. All this is correct so far as it goes; but I do not see why the moon should often look extremely yellow in the middle of the night after twilight has quite disappeared. Does it show that the light, one knows not exactly whence it comes, which is found even on clouded and moonless nights, is purple? There are some grounds for this hypothesis, because the moon almost always, as I have been assured by a practical astronomer, looks comparatively white through a telescope, which of course isolates the field of vision. Also, it seems to me that the street gaslights are just as yellow at midnight as in twilight; the stars, also, commonly look yellow all the night through. It is strange that, the very frequent and beautiful phenomenon of the white moon of the day suddenly turning yellow as the evening closes in, should not have long since attracted scientific comment.

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