Question: How come in the daylight we can only see the sky but when it's night time you can see space?

Asked by shaunt to Arti, Chris, Dustin, James, Steven on 18 May 2012.

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  1. Photo: James ByrneJames Byrne
    answered on 18 May 2012:

    This is because the light of the sun is to bright for the sparkle of other stars to be seen.

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  2. Photo: Dustin WelbourneDustin Welbourne
    answered on 18 May 2012:

    Hi Shaunt,

    This is a good question, and James has answered why you dont see the stars during the day. But I think you are asking why we seem to see sky, whereas at night we seem to see through it.

    During the day, the sky appears blue to us due to the scattering of sunlight. Blue sunlight scatters more than red, hence we see a blue sky. But at night, there is no sunlight coming into our part of the atmosphere, so the sky is essentially transparent.

    Great question

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  3. Photo: Steven TingaySteven Tingay
    answered on 19 May 2012:

    It is the scattering of sunlight by our atmosphere. The light from the stars still comes through our atmosphere with the same intensity during the day as during the night, but it is dim compared to the scattered light of the Sun during the day. By the way, the scattered light is polarised. If you have polarising glasses and rotate them in front of your eyes, the light from the sky gets dimmer or brighter, depending where you are looking. When the polarisation angle of the glasses lines up with the polarisation angle of the light from the sky, more gets through the polarised lens.

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  4. Photo: Arti SinghArti Singh
    answered on 22 May 2012:

    Hi Shaunt,
    During the daytime, the strongest source of light for us is the sun. The particles in the Earth’s atmosphere scatters the sunlight (which is actually white), and different wavelengths of light are scattered differently, depending on things such as the position of the sun in the sky (or its position relative to the horizon). When the sun is pretty much overhead, we see the sky as being blue. At night, we no longer have sunlight available to us (except what is reflected off the moon as moonlight), so we don’t have any sunlight to be scattered and we don’t see the blue sky anymore. The stars are always there and twinkling, so we can see them at night against the background of space when there is no sunlight, but we can’t see them during the day because the sunlight is too strong. When the sun is rising or setting, we can see colours such as orange because of the different position of the sun relative to the horizon, which affects the scattering of the different wavelengths of light. You can read more about this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise if you are interested.

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