40 Fun Facts About Sunrise and Sunset

On which planet do sunsets glow blue around the Sun, because fine dust hanging in the air filters the daylight?

Mars has butterscotch daytime skies that turn blue near the setting Sun, the reverse of Earth, and its Sun looks only two-thirds as wide.

Which planet, called both the morning star and the evening star, spins backwards so the Sun rises in the west there?

Venus turns clockwise, the opposite way to most planets, and so slowly that one spin takes 243 Earth days, longer than its entire year.

About how many sunrises do astronauts aboard the International Space Station see each day as they circle Earth?

16 sunrises and sunsets pass the station every day because of its orbital speed, so the windows are covered during sleep periods to fake a night.

Which country's native name is written with characters meaning the sun's origin?

Japan adopted the name Nippon after an envoy to the Tang court said he disliked the older label for his country, a tenth-century history records.

Which prehistoric monument in southern England is aligned towards the sunrise on the summer solstice?

Stonehenge works in reverse too: the same axis that frames the midsummer sunrise points to the sunset on the shortest day of the year.

Which French artist painted Impression, Sunrise, the harbour scene credited with giving Impressionism its name?

Claude Monet showed the hazy view of Le Havre, his hometown, in 1874, and the critic Louis Leroy borrowed its title to name the whole new style.

Which name do astronomers give the moving line between day and night, where a sunrise or sunset is under way?

Terminator is the astronomers' word, and at its fastest the line sweeps over flat ground at roughly 1,040 mph.

Which Indonesian volcano's 1883 eruption produced spectacular red sunsets around the world for many months afterwards?

Krakatoa darkened skies for years, and a British artist, William Ascroft, made thousands of colour sketches of the red sunsets that followed.

At which point in a typical day does the air usually reach its lowest temperature?

Near sunrise is usually the coldest point, not midnight, because the ground goes on shedding warmth until the Sun returns to top it up.

Which tall garden flowers track daylight from east to west while young, then settle facing the dawn once mature?

Sunflowers stop turning once they bloom, and the belief that open flower heads follow the Sun all day is a common misconception.

Which process in Earth's air, named after a British physicist, strips blue from low sunlight and leaves sunsets red?

Rayleigh scattering hits short blue wavelengths hardest, which also explains the daytime sky: that stray blue reaches the eye from every direction.

Which effect of Earth's atmosphere keeps the Sun visible at sunset after it has geometrically dropped below the horizon?

Refraction lifts the Sun's image by about its own width, so the whole disc is already below the horizon when it appears to touch it.

On which twice-yearly occasion does the Sun rise due east and set due west for almost everyone on Earth?

Equinox comes from the Latin for equal night, because day and night are then almost the same length everywhere on the planet.

Which name do photographers give the spell of soft, reddish daylight shortly after sunrise or before sunset?

Golden hour happens because low sunlight crosses far more air, which softens and reddens it; film crews also call it the magic hour.

Which fleeting optical effect, seen for a second or two as the Sun sets, did an 1882 Jules Verne novel help popularise?

Green flash sightings rarely last more than two seconds, appearing as the atmosphere splits the Sun's colours apart; Verne titled his novel The Green Ray.

After sunset, which stage of fading daylight comes first, lasting until the Sun is six degrees below the horizon?

Civil twilight still gives enough daylight for most outdoor activities, and lawmakers borrow the idea for rules such as when drivers must switch on headlights.

Near which line of latitude is twilight shortest, because the Sun drops at a right angle to the horizon?

The Equator gets a little over 70 minutes of twilight before sunrise, while the polar regions can spend many hours in half-light.

In which month does the Sun finally set at the South Pole, after roughly six months of continuous daylight?

March brings the only sunset of the polar year, as southern autumn begins, and the Sun does not rise there again until late September.

On which world does the gap from one sunrise to the next last about 29.5 Earth days, with daylight for two weeks?

The Moon turns once in about the time it takes to circle Earth, so each lunar sunrise is followed by a fortnight of day and a fortnight of night.

By the astronomers' definition, sunrise happens when which part of the Sun's disc appears on the horizon?

Its upper edge, not its centre, marks the moment, and sunset uses the mirror rule: it ends when the last sliver of that same rim disappears.

Which Egyptian god was said to sail the sky by day, then cross the underworld to be reborn at sunrise?

Ra used two boats, a morning barque for the daytime sky and an evening one that carried him through the underworld and back east for his rebirth.

Which Roman goddess of the dawn gave her name to the northern lights, a term Galileo was using by 1619?

Aurora was said to cross the sky from east to west each day announcing the coming of the Sun, and her Greek counterpart was Eos.

During Ramadan, which meal do Muslims eat at sunset to break the daily fast, traditionally beginning with dates?

Iftar follows the sunset call to prayer, while the other meal of a fasting day, suhur, has to be finished before dawn.

The Jewish Sabbath begins shortly before sunset on which day of the week, when candles are lit to welcome it?

Friday evening opens the Sabbath because the Jewish calendar counts each day from sunset to sunset, and it lasts until three stars show the next night.

Which Christian festival is marked by outdoor sunrise services, first recorded among Moravians in Saxony in 1732?

Easter drew the unmarried men of Herrnhut to the hilltop graveyard after an all-night vigil, where they sang hymns as the day broke.

In one common version of the old weather rhyme, a red sky at night delights which workers instead of sailors?

Shepherds share the rhyme with sailors, and the idea is ancient: the Gospel of Matthew already treats a red evening sky as a sign of fair weather.

Which bugle call, named from the French for wake up, is chiefly used to rouse soldiers at sunrise?

Reveille need not be played on a bugle: the wake-up call has also been sounded on trumpets, drums, fifes and pipes.

Which term describes animals that are active mainly at dawn and dusk, from the Latin word for twilight?

Crepuscular species divide into dawn specialists, called matutinal, and dusk specialists, called vespertine, and the habit is thought to help dodge predators.

Which term names the reddish light seen on mountains only once the Sun is below the horizon?

Alpenglow, from the German for Alps glow, is not direct sunlight at all: it is light bounced back off the air after the Sun has gone.

Which faint glow of sunlight bounced off interplanetary dust is nicknamed the false dawn when seen before sunrise?

Zodiacal light is so faint that light pollution easily hides it, and it has a partner glow, the gegenschein, on the far side of the sky from the Sun.

Which sandstone monolith in Australia's Northern Territory is known for glowing red at dawn and sunset?

Uluru owes the colour to rust: iron-bearing minerals in the rock oxidise at the surface, while freshly exposed stone is grey.

Which Norwegian Arctic archipelago, home to Longyearbyen, has no sunset between mid-April and late August?

Svalbard pays for it in winter: Longyearbyen sees no sunrise from late October to mid-February, and holds a Sun Festival Week when daylight returns.

At which Egyptian temple of Ramesses II does the rising Sun light statues deep in the sanctuary on two days a year?

Abu Simbel keeps one figure in shadow even then: Ptah, a god linked with the realm of the dead, while the other statues on the back wall catch the light.

Which Irish passage tomb lets the winter solstice sunrise flood its inner chamber through a slot above the entrance?

Newgrange catches the beam for only about 17 minutes, and the tomb was built around 3100 BC, before the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Which Pacific nation moved the International Date Line in 1995, making it first to see the third millennium's dawn?

Kiribati had been split in two by the line, and the move put its Line Islands in the most advanced time zone on Earth.

Which figure-eight shape appears when the Sun is photographed from one spot at the same clock time throughout a year?

Analemma photographs need a fixed camera and a full year of exposures, and the width of the loop shows how far the Sun runs ahead of or behind the clock.

Which 1964 Broadway musical includes the wedding song Sunrise, Sunset, sung as Tevye's daughter Tzeitel marries?

Fiddler on the Roof has both parents sing it in disbelief that their eldest has grown up, and its original Broadway run was the first by a musical to pass 3,000 performances.

In the 1995 film Before Sunrise, Jesse and Céline spend one night wandering which European capital before parting?

Vienna is where the two strangers step off a train from Budapest together, and the film's principal photography took place in the city itself.

Which American writer's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises follows expatriates from Paris to the bull-running in Pamplona?

Ernest Hemingway prefaced the book with a long quotation from Ecclesiastes, and his London publisher issued it a year later under the title Fiesta.

On which desert planet, orbiting a pair of stars, does Luke Skywalker watch a double sunset in the first Star Wars film?

Tatooine was filmed in the deserts of Tunisia, and its double sunset is often counted among the greatest sunset scenes in cinema history.