Why do sunrises look different from sunsets?

Answer 1

The sun rises and sets in different places because the axis of rotation of the Earth is tilted with respect to the plane of the ecliptic. Since the Earth is rotating about its axis at the same time it revolves about the Sun, this causes the sun rise and sun set to appear in different places, depending on the time of year.

Answer 2

You've woken up out of a coma. You yank the IV from your arm and stumble out of the hospital. The sun is perched on the horizon. Can you tell whether it's rising or setting?

Contemplating this scenario while gazing sunward at dusk or dawn, we might feel as if we could sense the difference between the two times of day. But in real life, it's impossible to completely divorce our perceptions of the scene from our awareness of the hour. So, is there any objective way to distinguish an upward-trending sun from a downward one?

According to atmospheric physicists David Lynch and William Livingston, the answer is "yes, and no."

All "twilight phenomena" are symmetric on opposite sides of midnight, and occur in reverse order between sunset and sunrise, the authors note in "Color and Light in Nature" (Cambridge University Press, 2001). That means there's no inherent, natural cause of a major optical difference between them. However, The first is in our heads. "At sunset, our eyes are daylight adapted and may even be a bit weary from the day's toil," Lynch and Livingston write. "As the light fades, we cannot adapt as fast as the sky darkens. Some hues may be lost or perceived in a manner peculiar to sunset. At sunrise, however, the night's darkness has left us with very acute night vision and every faint, minor change in the sky's color is evident." In short, you may perceive more colors at dawn than at dusk. [Red-Green & Blue-Yellow: The Stunning Colors You Can't See]

Human activities also drive a divergence between them. "At sunset the sky is full of pollutants and wind-borne particles," the authors write. "During the night, winds die down, smog-producing urban activity eases and the atmosphere cleanses itself. The dawn is clearer than any other time of day."

It's a matter of opinion whether pollution or a lack of it makes for prettier twilights. At dawn, clearer skies enable more brilliant reds and Oranges to make their way through the atmosphere to your eyes, whereas thicker atmospheres at dusk tend to dull these colors, leading to more washed-out sunsets. On the other hand, more dust and smog (at sunset) can have the effect of scattering light across a greater region of the sky, creating a larger drape of colors, whereas sunrise colors tend to be more focused around the sun. Whichever you prefer, you can frequently tell a sunrise from a sunset by the fact that the latter appears more chaotic, and the former, tidier.

According to the astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, there's also a trick for distinguishing a sunrise from a sunset played in reverse. Because of Earth's tilt, the sun doesn't rise or set along a vertical line, but at an angle. "When viewed from all latitudes north of the Tropic of Cancer (23.5 degrees north latitude), the sun always rises at an angle up and to the right, and sets and an angle down and to the right,"Tyson writes on his website. "That's how you can spot a faked sunrise in a movie: it moves up and to the left. Filmmakers are not typically awake in the morning hours to film an actual sunrise, so they film a sunset instead, and then time-reverse it, thinking nobody will notice."

So if you see a rising sun move up and to the left, you know you're in The Twilight Zone. Better head back to the hospital.two human factors break their symmetry.

Answer 3

Because the world is round so the sun hits parts of the earth at different angles in different ways. And it is not just because the earth is round, but because the earth's axis is tilted relative to its orbital plane. The tilt is about 23.4 degrees from vertical. If the axis (the poles) we oriented at exactly 90 degrees (perfectly upright) then sunset and sunrise would be at the same time everywhere except at the poles.

Answer 4

No. The place on the horizon where the Sun appears to rise or set always changes a tiny bit each day. From December 21 to June 21, the sunrise point moves a little north each day, and from June 21 to December 21 it moves slightly south each day.

Answer 5

Because the the axis of the Earth's rotation is tilted by 23 degrees, different locations on the Earth face the sun from different angles, which results in different times for the sun rise. This also varies by season, as the Earth orbits the sun.

Answer 6

No, not exactly. The direction of sunrise varies slightly each day, but the day-to-day difference is pretty small.

But over the course of six months, it's pretty obvious. From my home in California, with a latitude of about 37 degrees north, the direction of sunrise today in early July is distinctly north of east, to the extent that the morning sun streams into my north-facing windows. (The evening sun is equally bright, as the sun sets in the northwest.)

By the equinox on September 21, the Sun will rise pretty much due east, and set just about due west, and my north-facing window will be not see the Sun for another six months. By the winter solstice on December 21 (those dates can vary a day either way, depending on the cycle of leap years) the Sun will rise much later, and well south of east.

In fact, the megalithic monument Stonehenge in England is arranged in such a way so that on the summer solstice - and on NO OTHER DAY - the Sun appears to rises directly over a specific stone when standing in the center of the stone ring.

Answer 7

It is an optical illusion. The sun appears large compared to objects on the distant horizon. Against the vastness of the sky, the sun appears smaller.

Answer 8

the sun appears to rise a little sooner at higher altitudes, but not by a noticeable amount

Answer 9

bacause we all see the sun rise at different times. Therefore the sun may look orange for america,but look yellow for china