Cosmic sunset
Gerónimo Villanueva, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, has created impressive simulations of what sunsets would look like on a variety of planets.
The animation shows what you would see through a super wide fisheye lens that points to the sky from the surface of a planet, so be sure to go full screen for the full effect.
A second animation, below, shows what the same sunsets would look like from a more conventional perspective.
Dusty sunset on mars
For example, a sunset on Uranus would appear mostly blue, fading to greenish turquoise due to the hydrogen, helium, and methane in its atmosphere that absorbs the red portion of the visible light spectrum. For similar reasons, Earth’s sky appears blue on clear days.
On Mars, on the other hand, sunsets go from brown to blue due to dust particles that scatter the blue portion of the visible spectrum.
To create the simulations, Villaneuva used an online tool called the Planetary Spectrum Generator, which is capable of producing the appearance of night skies on a variety of planets.
READ MORE: NASA simulation shows a kaleidoscope of sunsets on other worlds [NASA]
More about sunsets: What differentiates the sunsets on Mars from those on Earth?
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