Why does it seem as if the satellites in the sky are getting brighter and closer to earth?
553637
It's all the carrots you've been eating.  Your night vision is getting better.  Don't worry if you turn orange, it is a harmless side effect. \n\nHave you seen my nocturnal friend?
909859
We have the ability now to measure the orbit of the Earth, and all other planets, to very high precision, and it is not getting closer to the Sun.\n\nYou can do a very rough measurement yourself. If the Earth gets closer to the Sun, the Sun will appear bigger in the sky. Measure it in photographs taken by the same telescope a year apart. \n\nAnother consideration is this. Currently, the Moon and Sun appear the same size in the sky, which produces spectacular total eclipses of the Sun. If the Earth got just a little closer to the Sun, the Moon would no longer be able to completely cover the Sun. So if total solar eclipses continue as usual, that is evidence the Earth is not getting any nearer to the Sun.
927909
ahhh more swamp gas refracting off venus with a strange cloud formation, is what they'll have you believe.\nfollow it up at http://www.ufoevidence.org/ \nGood luck
416509
You can see many of them with the naked eye, and some of the get pretty darn bright.  You can even see the inetrantional space station when it passes overhead.  Of course any of these objects will jusst look like a star moving across the sky at a decent rate.  But it is pretty cool.\n\nhttp://www.heavens-above.com will tell you exactly what is visible from your location on any night, as well as where to look.  You'll need a little bit of amature astronomy knowledge (magnitudes, reading a starchart) to get much out of it, but it is an awsome resource for this kind of thing.
905719
This sounds typically like ball lightning - a name that has been coined for this type of phenomenon is "earth lights".\n\nEarth lights are a rare anomalous light phenomenon, mistaken throughout history as dragons, UFOs, and ball lightning before being recognised as a separate category. One leading theory is that they are produced by tectonic strain in minor fault lines, so that they are literally generated by the earth.\n\nIn America they've been called "spooklights" or "ghost lights" since at least the 1950s, but Persinger and Lafrenière were the first scientists to recognise the phenomenon, in the late 1970s. The lights were renamed and brought to wider public attention by Paul Devereux in 1982 with his publication "Earth Lights".\n\nThey appear in many colours, shapes, and sizes, though the basketball-sized globular orange variety seems most common. Most sightings occur at night, when some lights can be seen from miles around. They're reported to be able to move against the wind and reach extraordinary speeds. Their terrestrial nature means that though many sightings are sporadic, there are some locations where they appear relatively often. It's through studying these hotspots, such as Hessdalen in Norway and the Engligh Pennines, that their characteristics become evident.\n\nPlease see links below.
231023
This is caused by thermic convection of the air. In the deserts you normally have high differences in temperature between day and night, so hot air is rising rapidly while cold air is moving downwards after sunset. This different densities in the air makes the light bend and the stars seems as if they are dancing, just as if you were looking through an irregular glass. \nIt's a bad night for astronomers.
852339
Well, obviously the sun doesn't stop outputting light just because we're cloudy.  We're still getting 1120 W/m^2 through the atmosphere.  It's just being reflected, scattered, or absorbed by clouds, moisture, etc.\n\nSince clouds appear white from space, that says that a big chunk of the sunlight that would otherwise have it the ground winds up sailing off into space.
139013
The main reason that heavenly bodies appear to twinkle is because of materials between them and your eyes - normally it's atmospheric interference which makes them appear to distort and shift. This actually happens with planets as well, but it's less obvious because they appear larger in the sky and so minor distortions don't have such an effect.
222729
because at the horizon the atmosphere is more concave than right above us.  It's like looking through a pair of glasses at the horizon.
687477
Hi Princess,\n\nYes, the sky is on the world, or at least the blueness of it is. I'm sure you have been looking at pictures of our world taken from space and you have seen the blue haziness round the edges.\n\nWe are very tiny, like ants, walking around under that blue haze called the atmosphere. When we look up, we see it from underneath.\n\nAsk your mummy to get Google Earth. It's a marvellous thing which will fly you (on the computer) where ever you want to go in the world and show you the mountains and the seas and maybe even the house where you live!\n\nThank you for asking all these questions! I am really enjoying answering them :)
123930
Atmospheric distortions causes difficulties in truly viewing far away objects and the farther they are the greater the distortion. That is why observatories are often built high up in mountains to lessen interference from atmosphere as well as light pollution. Ideally satellites are left in orbit in space function best of all without these influences and the best pictures taken of stars and galaxies are achieved by these.
300540
Observed from Earth’s surface, stars appear to twinkle because the atmosphere bends light on its way to the ground.  Stars are so far away that they appear as points of light in the sky, so when the atmosphere bends light from a star, it actually prevents the light from the star from reaching our eyes entirely—in other words, the tiny beam of light from the star that could reach our eyes at that point in time gets deflected away from our eyes briefly.  Thus, stars appear to twinkle on and off.  At one instant, a star’s light reaches your eye; at the next instant, it doesn’t.\n\nThe sun is simply too large to twinkle.  Yeah, one beam of light may get scattered away (perhaps to enhance the blueness of our sky), but the beam of light next to it will make it to your eyes, and on average, the whole sun appears nice and bright and untwinkling in the sky.  (Likewise, the moon doesn’t appear to twinkle, either.)\n\nIn space, there’s no atmosphere, no air to change the trajectory of light reaching your eyes (assuming your eyes are safely enclosed in a spacesuit with the rest of you), so the stars will not twinkle.  \n\n\nRyan Wyatt\nRose Center for Earth & Space\nNew York, New York
151358
The satellite has a straight rotation around the earth but most do not have the same direction of rotation as the earth. but a tilted rotation so that it passes from the northern hemesphere to the southeren hemesphere. combined with the earths actual rotation makes it look like the satellite zig zag
591541
While refraction by the atmosphere is too small to affect the apparent diameter of the moon except perhaps when it is within one diameter of the horizon (and in this case, the moon will appear stretched a bit in the direction perpindicular to the horizon) it does appear larger to our brains when on the horizon because we see it in reference to distant large objects.  Gives the impression of it looking bigger, however if you could look straight up at the moon, and see a bunch of trees a mile up in sky between you and the moon it would look just as large as when it is near the horizon.  (If you ever do see this by the way, seek shelter or psychiatric treatment immediately!)\n\nThe moons orbit IS elliptical, however, and at times will be closer to the earth than others.  This phenomenon is called "lunation" and there is a great still and a gif animation of this at the Astronomy Picture of the Day.\n\nhttp://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap041021.html\nhttp://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap991108.html\n\nThe moon's surface brightness (brightness per area) also varies with phase. Because larger particles tend to reflect a bit more light directly back at the light source than in other directions (look up "Mie" scattering) a given bit of the moon will appear brighter when the earth is in the direction of the sun as seen from the moon. (All three are in a line with the Earth more or less between). This occurs when the moon is full or near full. This brightening might make the moon look larger.
924882
There are thousands of large objects up there.  Any evening within a few hours after sunset, and it's pretty common to see quite a number of them with the naked eye.  They catch the sun's light and you can see the dots moving across the sky.
752575
The scientific name for the twinkling of stars is stellar scintillation (or astronomical scintillation). Stars twinkle when we see them from the Earth's surface because we are viewing them through thick layers of turbulent (moving) air in the Earth's atmosphere. \n\nStars (except for the Sun) appear as tiny dots in the sky; as their light travels through the many layers of the Earth's atmosphere, the light of the star is bent (refracted) many times and in random directions (light is bent when it hits a change in density - like a pocket of cold air or hot air). This random refraction results in the star winking out (it looks as though the star moves a bit, and our eye interprets this as twinkling). \n\nStars closer to the horizon appear to twinkle more than stars that are overhead - this is because the light of stars near the horizon has to travel through more air than the light of stars overhead and so is subject to more refraction. Also, planets do not usually twinkle, because they are so close to us; they appear big enough that the twinkling is not noticeable (except when the air is extremely turbulent). \n\nStars would not appear to twinkle if we viewed them from outer space (or from a planet/moon that didn't have an atmosphere). \n\n\n---------------------------------------------------------------------------------\nStars, except for the Sun, although they may be millions of miles in diameter, are very far away.  They appear as point sources even when viewed by telescopes.  The planets in our solar system, much smaller than stars, are closer and can be resolved as disks with a little bit of magnification (field binoculars, for example).\n\nSince the Earth's atmosphere is turbulent, all images viewed up through it tend to "swim."  The result of this is that sometimes a single point in object space gets mapped to two or more points in image space, and also sometimes a single point in object space does not get mapped into any point in image space.  When a star's single point in object space fails to map to at least one point in image space, the star seems to disappear temporarily.  This does not mean the star's light is lost for that moment.  It just means that it didn't get to your eye, it went somewhere else.\n\nSince planets represent several points in object space, it is highly likely that one or more points in the planet's object space get mapped to a points in image space, and the planet's image never winks out.  Each individual ray is twinkling away as badly as any star, but when all of those individual rays are viewed together, the next effect is averaged out to something considerably steadier.\n\nThe result is that stars tend to twinkle, and planets do not.  Other extended objects in space, even very far ones like nebulae, do not twinkle if they are sufficiently large that they have non-zero apparent diameter when viewed from the Earth.\n-------------------------------------------------------------\n\n\nI can be more specific, sure. Remember that just like a computer screen, your eye is composed of a certain number of "pixels," each represented by a single light-receptor cell in your retina. If two (or more) points of light are close enough such that they are focused on the same receptor cell in your eye, you will experience them as a single point of light. This is referred to as the "resolution" of your eye, or any telescope for that matter. \n\n\nNow, a star on the sky is in a true sense a single point of light. All the light comes through the atmosphere in exactly the same direction, through exactly the same atmospheric turbulence, and thus is bent in exactly the same way. So when it gets to your eye, the amount of light you see coherently varies. It also strikes (primarily) only a single receptor in your eye. \n\n\nOn the other hand, light from a planet is different. Each of a few receptors in your eye sees a large number of light rays coming f
136889
Its an illusion.  Its because the moon is closer to objects to which you can compare it.