Then we should see this effect elsewhere in the galaxy, not just near our Earth-Moon system. I can think of no such phenomenon.

Normally the sun's light overpowers the red light. Thus we only see it during the eclipses.

I have already explained where the phenomenon is commonly observed: the red shift which explains that the universe is expanding. Its quite well documented; I originally heard about it on Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Its quite well known that the ambient light of the universe is red. This is where the expanding universe idea comes from initially.

Some more pics of the Red sky effect during cloudy solar eclipses.






Click Click: October 2005


Solar Eclipse Observed Armagh Observatory


APOD: 2001 December 21 - Partial Eclipse, Cloudy Day



Skygazers come out in force to watch UK partial solar eclipse | Mail Online


Not all have the same degree of cloud cover, and not all have the same degree of redness.

bittah.com :: View topic - total lunar eclipse - 28th august

(the photographer dubbed this one the 'satanic eclipse' - quite a wicked photo, I must say)

And here is a whole sequence of such photos:
Picasa Web Albums - Soumyo - Solar eclipse

;-j

... wow! - you couldn't ask for a better juxtaposition than that!!!

If the Sun's light overpowers red light, why can I see the color red on Earth? I understand Hubble and his red-shift. My point is that due to the propagation of light, and inverse square law, there's nowhere near enough light (from outside our galaxy, generated by galaxies travelling at relativistic speeds) to illuminate the Moon to such an extent as we see.

BTY, that picture is very cool! :a-ok: We could call it "Armageddon."

How can you be so sure?
Thats a lot of light, coming from alot of galaxies for a very very very long time.

And, there is certainly no red light coming off the Earth's atmosphere when seen from space during an eclipse.

The theory of which was put forward by someone who believed the sun is white, which it clearly is not.

So the red light during eclipses is clearly the ambient glow of the universe.

"The red tint of the eclipsed Moon is created by sunlight first passing through the Earth's atmosphere, which preferentially scatters blue light (making the sky blue) but passes and refracts red light, before reflecting back off the Moon. Differing amounts of clouds and volcanic dust in the Earth's atmosphere make each lunar eclipse appear differently."

Isn't our nearest galacitic neighbor, Andromeda, moving toward our Milky Way? The primary source of your red-shifted light just disappeared!

Its the collective light of the entire universe, way more than one galaxy.
Countless zillions of galaxies.

You must prefere the idea of the red dwarfs then?

Then why isn't the night sky completely lit up with the light of stars?

I already answered this:

The geometrical shape of the moon condenses the light in the inverse way that a satelite dish would.



And just to reitterate what else was said:
It would be impossible to show all the light in a diagram, this just shows most of the light from the perspective of the earth.

No, I'm asking why wouldn't the sky be completely filled with the light of stars every night? In other words, a totally illuminated celestial sphere.

Aah.
A very interesting question.

I read a book a number of years ago, (sorry I forgot the title) that explained this is because the universe has a beginning. The deeper into space we look, the further back in time we look. If the universe was eternal, (had no beginning) then the light coming from the ever distant past, would add up and the sky would be bright. So the blackness of the sky is actually the emptiness of nothing - the origin of the universe.


I would just like to poke a hole in something else that I guessed concerning how the sky would look on the moon from a lunar eclipse. Obviously the geometry in the diagram would not be in effect in the same manner, and it would actually be the Earth that would now appear red.

Not green as I had earlier suggested. Of course the Earth's atmosphere may actually absorb the red light, and not reflect it. But now I really am just guessing.


I must say that the more I consider all this, the more confusing it all gets.
But I still think my theory, although not certain, is at least logical, and is not based on any premise that has been proven to be false. (Unlike Rayleigh)

;-j

The problem I find with your hypotheses deals with the amount of starlight that actully gets to the human eye. Let's take the star Sirius for an example. This star has an absolute magnitude of 1.4. For reference, our Sun measures in at 4.8. As we can see, Sirius (the powerful "A" class star) is a much brighter star than our own. In other words, if Sirius where to replace our Sun, we'd be toast. It is obvious that the reason Sirius looks dimmer to us here on Earth is it's distance...8.6 light years. Now let us concider the apparent magnitude of each star. Sirius is measured at -1.5 and our Sun is -26.7. In astronomy, a brightness ratio is used to compair such brightness. Each difference in magnitude is multiplied by 2.5. For example, a 1.0 point difference in magnitude changes the brightness by 2.5. A 2.0 point increase/decrease would be 6.3 and so on. With about a 25 point difference between the apparent magnitudes of the Sun and Sirius, we find that we see only one ten-billionth the light that Sirius produces...and this is at a very short distance (8.6 light years away) compaired to any galaxy (multi-millions of light years away). There's just not enough light.

I see your point.

You must however consider that even blue stars when at a distance exhibit the red shift effect.

The amount of light (like in your Sirius example) that reaches us decreases by a considerable amount when the distance increases. But the sheer volume of stars increases at a considerable amount. From what I can see these two amounts reach a balance.

Now if one considers that the average colour of a star is middle range : white. Then; the average colour of all the stars as we see them would be red because of the red shift.

If there were no such thing as a red shift, then the average colour of their light would be white.

I will do some calculations at this point, to verify what I have said, and then get back to you.

equations from Sphere - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

surface area of a sphere


volume of a sphere


ok, so:

Assume that light which has no visible red shift is < 1 r
Assume that light which actually has a visible red shift is > 1 r

So, the volume of stars at a distance of less then 1 r from us is equal to 1 vol.
The volume of stars between 1 r and 2 r ... is 2^3 vol - 1 vol. Which is 7 vol.
So there are 7 times as many stars between 1r and 2r as there are within 1r.

Now assume, the amount of light we receive from each star at a distance of 1r = 1 lig.
The amount of light we receive from each star at 2 ligs is therefor 1/4 of a lig.

We can clearly see that the volume of stars increases to the power of 3,
while the amount of light we receive from each star decreases to the power of 2.

My initial assumption that they would balance is not quite true.
In fact the sum total of red light from distant galaxies is actually increasingly greater than that of nearby galaxies.

This is because the volume of galaxies increases at a greater rate than the amount of light diminishes from each galaxy.

All we have to do now, is find out at what distance the red shift is visibly observable.
(My searches for a simple answer, thus far are fruitless)

So long as r is less than 7 billion light years (half the age-width {time-space} of the universe), we can be assured that there is more than enough light from the red shift to illuminate the moon during the lunar eclipse.

There is considerably more distant red light, than white light from nearby galaxies. I leave it to the physcists to give us the exact answers. Mine are, of course, approximations.

;-j

It seems to me that we have more than enough light...from our Sun!

Not during an eclipse!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What about the umbra and penumbra?