Astronomy & Celestial Mechanics
the sky, computed
Concept

Twilight — where it appears

The interval after sunset and before sunrise when the sky is lit by sunlight scattered from the upper atmosphere. On the Earth it lasts while the Sun is less than 18 degrees below the horizon, an angle set by the height of the air against the planet's radius.

Named by 4 essays across one field — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Twilight at latitude 52°. Solar altitude through the second half of the day at 52°, on June solstice, equinox, December solstice, with the four thresholds that define twilight marked. Sunset is at −0.833° rather than at 0° because the Sun's own semi-diameter and the atmosphere's refraction together lift it by that much when it is geometrically already down. Civil twilight ends at −6°, when the brightest stars appear and outdoor work stops; nautical at −12°, when the horizon can no longer be seen against the sky and a sextant becomes useless; astronomical at −18°, when the sky stops contributing to a photometric measurement. Their durations at equinox here are 34 min, 40 min, 42 min — twilight is not a fixed length, it is the reciprocal of how steeply the Sun descends, and the Sun descends at an angle of about 90° − φ to the horizon. At this latitude the curve for June solstice never reaches −18° at all: astronomical twilight does not end, and there is no astronomically dark night from about 48.6° upward.

Three definitions of night

Twilight ends at three different depression angles, and each threshold is a statement about what can no longer be done. Its length is not a duration but a rate — how fast the Sun goes down — and above one latitude the deepest of the three never arrives at all.

sky · Twilight The zenith sky after sunset, as single scattering predicts it. The brightness of the zenith sky at 550 nm, in magnitudes per square arcsecond with brighter upward, against the Sun's depression below the horizon, computed by single scattering in a spherical atmosphere: US Standard Atmosphere densities, Rayleigh scattering, a 300 Dobson-unit ozone layer, and every photon scattered exactly once. The Earth's shadow climbs the zenith as R(sec d − 1) — 8.7 km at 3°, 35.1 at 6°, 142 at 12° — through air that thins by a factor of e every eight kilometres or so, so the brightness does not fall steadily: it falls 1.4 magnitudes a degree between 3° and 6°, and 2.7 a degree between 7° and 10°. The model gives 14.3 at the end of civil twilight and 27.0 at the end of nautical. The dashed line is the natural night sky, 21.9 magnitudes per square arcsecond. Single scattering reaches it at 9.25° of depression — 8.8 degrees before the 18° at which astronomical twilight is observed to end. The difference is not an error in the arithmetic; it is the light this model leaves out, scattered more than once.

The shadow that climbs the zenith

After sunset the sky overhead is lit only above the Earth's own shadow, and the shadow climbs as the square of the Sun's depression. Scattering computed once from that geometry predicts a sky that dims faster and faster and is as dark as night by nine degrees. The real sky takes eighteen, and the difference is light that has been scattered more than once.

sky · Twilight The colour of the zenith at twilight, with and without ozone. The colour of the zenith sky relative to sunlight — the 450 nm brightness against the 650 nm brightness, in magnitudes, bluer upward — against the Sun's depression, computed by single scattering with a 300 Dobson-unit ozone layer and again with none. Scattering alone favours blue by λ⁻⁴, which would make the sky 1.60 magnitudes bluer than sunlight if nothing were removed on the way; that is the dotted line. But after sunset every ray has travelled a long grazing path, and Rayleigh scattering removes blue from that path faster than red, so the two effects fight. Without ozone they very nearly cancel: the zenith is 0.01 magnitudes from sunlight's own colour at sunset and 0.06 at 6° — a pale, colourless sky — and only turns bluer, −0.13 at 10°, once the lit layer has climbed above most of the air the grazing ray used to cross. With ozone the zenith is −0.34 at sunset, −0.67 at 6° and −0.76 at 10°: bluer than without by 0.72 magnitudes at 6°, because the grazing ray also crosses the ozone layer near its tangent point, and ozone's Chappuis band absorbs orange and red rather than blue. The ozone cross-sections are approximate, and the conclusion does not depend on them to better than a factor of two.

Ozone keeps the twilight zenith blue

After sunset the sky overhead turns a deep blue, and scattering alone cannot explain it. The light that reaches the zenith has first grazed hundreds of kilometres of air, which strips blue out of the sunlight as fast as scattering puts it back, and the two very nearly cancel. What tips the balance is a gas that makes up a few parts in ten million of the atmosphere and absorbs the orange and red end of the spectrum.

sky · Twilight How far the Sun has to sink before the sky darkens, on four worlds. The dimming of the zenith sky relative to sunset, in magnitudes, against the Sun's depression, for single scattering in an isothermal atmosphere with the stated scale height and vertical optical depth, scattering isotropically: the Earth (R 6371 km, H 8.5 km, τ 0.097); Mars (dust) (R 3389.5 km, H 11.1 km, τ 0.5); Titan (haze) (R 2574.7 km, H 50 km, τ 4); Pluto (haze) (R 1188 km, H 50 km, τ 0.02). These are representative values for the layer that does the scattering — air on the Earth, dust on Mars, haze on Titan and Pluto — not full models of those atmospheres. The angle over which a sky darkens is set by the height of the scatterers against the size of the planet, √(2H/R), because that is the depression at which the shadow over the zenith has risen one scale height. The Earth dims by ten magnitudes at 8.6° of depression, which at the equator of a world whose solar day is 24 hours takes the Sun 35 minutes. Mars (dust) dims by ten magnitudes at 13.4° of depression, which at the equator of a world whose solar day is 24.66 hours takes the Sun 55 minutes. Titan (haze) dims by ten magnitudes at 29.8° of depression, which at the equator of a world whose solar day is 382.7 hours takes the Sun 31.7 hours. Pluto (haze) dims by ten magnitudes at 43.9° of depression, which at the equator of a world whose solar day is 153.3 hours takes the Sun 18.7 hours.

The air's height against the planet sets the twilight

On the Earth the sky overhead fades over about nine degrees of the Sun's descent. That angle is not a property of air or of sunlight. It is the square root of twice the height of the scattering layer divided by the radius of the planet, and on a small world with a tall haze it grows to tens of degrees — so that twilight on Titan lasts more than a day.

sky · Twilight

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Single-scatteringDepression angleEarth shadowOptical depthOzoneRayleigh scatteringScale heightSky brightnessCelestial sphereChappuis bandColour indexDimensional analysis

All concepts