Here you see a wide-angle image of the waxing crescent moon that appeared in a BLUE sky above Great Cove at 8:25 p.m. on Tuesday:
Below, you’ll see a long-lens image of the same moon that appeared in a DARK sky two minutes before the first image:
Do we have here one of those Churchillian riddles wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma? No, I don’t think so.
As I understand it, we see a blue sky when the sun’s rainbow of light colors reaches the Earth’s atmosphere and becomes scattered or deflected. Each rainbow color has a wavelength and the shorter that length, the more that light is scattered toward our eyes. Violet and blue have the shortest wavelengths, so they can become the dominant color that we see when looking into the atmosphere.
Violet and blue sunlight can be so bright that it prevents us from seeing the light of (or on) stars and other objects outside our atmosphere. However, if we pierce through that brightness with a telescope or long camera lens, the sun’s scattered light will disappear as well as the color that it brings us. (Images taken in Brooklin, Maine, on August 22, 2023.)