Doesn’t the darkness make things more difficult?
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While I’m sure it’s not a primary reason, shelling at night when more people are trying to sleep would have a greater psychological effect than during the day.
A large part of the reason why they are shelling near/in populated areas is psychological warfare. Doing this at night as well as during the day reinforces the idea that they can come down anywhere at anytime, never letting people rest or sleep. It’s also not really that much harder in the dark.
Yes, but it also makes it more difficult for people that are trying to shell, bombard, shoot at, or otherwise kill you. If you have mobile artillery and are for example, indiscriminately shelling residential areas and don’t care if you hit a police station or the apartment complex a block over, attacking at night means your own forces are harder to spot and target for a counterattack.
Because you can do it at night.
During the day, you can see what you’re doing and accomplish more militarily valuable tasks. But, you don’t want your enemy to rest just because you can’t see what you’re doing. Shelling randomly does a pretty low cost job of that.
The alternative, fighting at night with night vision, that’s only for a military with lots of money, like the Americans.
It’s harder to determine where the artillery is coming from at night, lessening the risk of a counterattack against vulnerable artillery pieces.
Persistent bombardment night and day also plays a psychological role in decreasing morale.
Your own accuracy will be marginally lower at night, but when you’re indiscriminately shelling a city that’s not all that important.
You do it both at night and during the day.
If you look at artillery fire with shells the darkness has no effect on how hard it is to fire them at least not for self-propelled artillery. If you have a towed howitzer you need to have some light to be able to move the shells and propellant but it is not a lot, you can do that in the moonlight.
If you are the one that spots the target you will use night vision ot thermal vision equipment so you can see in the dark.
There is one advantage of an attack like that during the night. You will disturb the enemy and even if you are in protected shelters sleeping will be hard.
If you have night vision equipment and the enemy does not attack during the night can be a huge advantage because you can see them and they can see you.
A big part of it is preventing your enemy from sleep. If you do not have night time operations going, might as well keep the people you trying to kill or control awake all night to reduce their effectiveness. Doing it for weeks destroys the enemies moral and causes sleep dep.
An attacker tends to have the advantage at night. Most of the things they are attacking are things that are hard to move or have no reason to move. So they can just bomb where they observed enemies during the day. However a defender can not shoot back because they do not know where the attacker might have moved to before their attack. For example a WWII bomber run would often happen at night as the bombers knew where the factories were but the anti-aircraft guns did not know where the bombers were.
Another strategic pattern is for attacks to commence at dawn. It is easier to prepare for an attack under the cover of darkness such as getting fresh supplies to the front lines, clearing mines and other defenses, moving your troops into position, etc. The shelling during the night is part of disassembling the defenses as well as to keep the enemy sleep deprived or hunkering down in bunkers. As soon as dawn breaks the attack can commence and can last the entire day if need be.
There are still shelling during the day though. However this is usually as part of a more complex engagement. Artillery observers are able to see where the shells need to land and relay this back to the ones firing. So during the night you might have large bombardments in the rough area where an enemy is located in the hopes that you might hit bunkers, barracks or vehicles but during the day a few shells will be used to take out the enemy positions that can be seen and which are firing back.
To keep the targets of the bombardment awake through the night, and thus less effective fighters durring the day.
Artillery is used against fixed targets. Once you’ve fixed them on that position, then they fire and hit that target. The shells don’t care whether it’s day or night, their trajectory is governed by gravity.
So it is no more or less difficult to shell a target at night than it is by day. And when you do it at night, you disrupt their sleep and possibly catch them off guard.
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