What are the 3 brightest objects in the sky? Sun, moon and what? Its visual magnitude, also please. Thanks!?
139607
Venus is brighter ,but the space station when you saw it might have been turn in a way that it was'nt getting a big reflection.Maybe it could be the time of year because of the axis of the earth .Just a guess.
180194
rises? the moon never sets you can always see it where i'm from(los angeles) day or night. as to why it looks orange? i don't know about orange. bright yellow maybe.
991288
A good site is Heavens Above (see link below).  Just register (it's free) and use the database to find tell it where you live by selecting your country then typing in the name of your city (no state, province, county...).  It will give you a list of town by that name to select from.  From there you can get sky maps and lots of other information.\n\nFor example, they also list the times that satellites and other orbiting bodies such as the International Space Station or the Hubble Telescope will pass by in the sky.  Since these objects are in space, they are in full sunlight even when the earth below is in the dark, so you can see a bright spot of light moving across the sky when this happens.  (The light is of course the sunlight reflecting off the satellite.)\n\nHave fun!
879437
check out this site\n\nhttp://www.space.com/spacewatch/061103_night_sky.html
191345
it is the brightest planet not but the sun is a star(the main source of all the energy in the solar system)venus derieves its brightness from the sun ,how can it be brighter rhan the sun
87052
The orange and red tints that the Sun and Moon sometimes take on are caused by the particles in the Earth's atmosphere. \n\nWhen light (or more specifically, packets of light called photons) from an astronomical object passes through the Earth's atmosphere, it scatters off of particles in the latter. It turns out that these particles like to scatter blue light more than they do red light; so "bluer" photons (those with shorter wavelengths) tend to get scattered, and "redder" photons (those with longer wavelengths) pass through. So, astronomical objects look redder from Earth than they would from space, because the redder wavelengths from the objects penetrate the atmosphere better than the bluer ones. Incidentally, this is why the sky is blue: blue light from the Sun is scattered in all directions on its way to the Earth. \n\nBut how does this explain the occasional redness of the Moon or the Sun? Your son may have noticed that they always occur when the Sun or Moon is close to the horizon. If you think about it, sunlight or moonlight must travel through the maximum amount of atmosphere to get to your eyes when the Sun or Moon is on the horizon (remember that that atmosphere is a sphere around the Earth). So, you expect *more* blue light to be scattered from Sunlight or Moonlight when the Sun or Moon is on the horizon than when it is, say, overhead; this makes the object look redder. In other words, the Sun or Moon tends to look orange or red when it is rising or setting because that's the time when the light has to travel through the most atmosphere to get to you. The effect is exacerbated when there are thin clouds in front or behind the Sun or Moon: the clouds themselves often glow bright pink as well, because they are so good at scattering blue light
388414
refraction from the atmosphere magnifies.  When the moon, or sun, is low on the horizon, you're looking through more of the atmosphere to see it.
262627
It is.  It's just very dark blue so it looks black.  I'm sure you'll agree that even a "very bright" moon is a lot darker than the sun.  I took a picture at night for fifteen seconds at 1600 ISO on a hazy night and the sky came out blue.  I think the bright points (stars) add contrast to the sky that make it look dark so the haze evened the sky out.
966613
I'm in Oklahoma and will be going out to see them.  The key is, will the constellation Leo be visible at 10:45?  If it is then we'll get to see the peak (about 2 per minute according to some articles)!  If it's not up in time, we should still get a show.
71027
first of all, to Paranoid Princess:\n\nwhoa, whoa WHOA.  just a minute.  the sky is not blue because there's liquid oxygen in the upper atmosphere.  that's just retarded and you shouldn't go presenting bizzare mis-truths as fact when they *aren't* fact.\n\nhere is a profile of temperatures at various altitudes:\nhttp://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/images/profile_jpg_image.html\nas you can clearly see the lowest temperature is about -100C.  oxygen liquefies at -182C at normal pressures (reference: http://www.ucc.ie/ucc/depts/chem/dolchem/html/elem/elem008.html ), and even lower temperatures at the low pressures in the upper atmosphere.  PLEASE don't present some bizarre fiction as truth to someone who isn't well-informed enough to know that you're simply fabricating nonsense from thin air.  if you have simply been misled by someone else, at least try to do a marginal amount of research before answering a question on something you don't know much about.\n\nthat said, to the original asker:\n\nthe sky is blue because of a phenomenon called "rayleigh scattering", which occurs because the molecules of air (mostly N2 and O2) happen to be the right size to scatter blue light in all directions.  some of this blue light reaches your eye after being re-scattered again by a second molecule, sometimes all the way across the sky.  \n\nthis is also why the sky turns red at sunset - at low angles, the sunlight has to travel a longer distance through the atmosphere, and by the time it reaches your eye, a lot of the blue light has already been scattered away, leaving yellow orange and red.  (i have yet to hear any explanation of why the sky doesn't turn green between daytime and sunset, though.  still tryin' to figure that one out.)\n\nanyway here are some home/school experiments designed to illustrate rayleigh scattering:\nhttp://www.physics.brown.edu/physics/demopages/Demo/optics/demo/6f4010.htm\nhttp://www.chaosscience.org.uk/dem/public_html/article.php?story=20050222224622239\nhttp://teachers.web.cern.ch/teachers/archiv/HST2002/smallexp/krug/Rayleigh.htm\nhttp://bulldog2.redlands.edu/facultyfolder/deweerd/research/scattering-AJP.pdf\nhttp://www.ktca.org/newtons/9/sky.html\n\nalso, a nice page illustrating rayleigh scattering:\nhttp://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/atmos/blusky.html\nand a slightly more advanced version:\nhttp://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/bluesky.html
744621
On a perfect day , with a very high storm to your front, a very clear sky to your back , the sun about a hour before setting, you could see three complete arcing rainbows stacked one atop the other. They're separate ,but uniform with one another.This is a rarer site, most often you will see 2 or 2 &the legs of the 3rd ...         The sun dogs spoken of are best seen on a clear sunny days with very high thin clouds. You can see 4 orb prisms, about the size of a ping-pong ball held out at arms length, 60degrees to the cloud ,to the north south east &west of the sun.
387674
You can't see the stars during the day due to a process call Rayliegh scattering.\nBasically the sun radiates many visible colours of visible light even though it looks yellow. The blue light that the sun radiates is scattered by the atmosphere in all direction whilst other colours are unaffected. This gives the sky a blue appearance during the day. The blue sky is much brighter than the stars and thus we cannot see them.\nStrange fact: It is because the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen that the sky is blue, if the atmosphere was mostly oxygen it would be green.
248593
Right now it's Venus. Try skyandtelescope.com for questions like that.
57986
if it is extemely bright, then it is most likely the planet Jupiter. The moon moves a lot each day, so you need to say exactly what day and time you saw it.
90126
Venus (called the Morning Star as it is visible in twilight) should be pretty bright in the eastern sky. \n\nI'm ignoring the moon or sun as you will immediately recognise them (hopefully). the moon appears at different positions at different times of the month.
14526
The bright ring is called a 'halo'\n\nIt's a fairly common sight and occurs when high thin clouds containing millions of tiny ice crystals cover much of the sky. Each ice crystal acts like a miniature lens. Because most of the crystals have a similar elongated hexagonal shape, light entering one crystal face and exiting through the opposing face refracts 22 degrees, which corresponds to the radius of the Moon Halo.\n\nSee a nice picture of one here:\nhttp://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap000515.html
929659
reflection of light\n\nDuring daylight the sky has the appearance of a deep blue surface, but this is the result of the air scattering sunlight. [1] There is no "blue object" above the earth in any normal sense, so it is hard to say what object the sky is. The sky is thus sometimes defined as the denser gaseous zone of a planet's atmosphere. At night the sky has the appearance of a black surface or region scattered with stars. But if we then say that the sky is the entire visible universe, it would not be the same thing we see during the day.