Why do sunsets and sunrises look so different? Isn’t it technically the same thing?
In: Earth Science
Here’s [an article on that exact subject](https://www.livescience.com/34065-sunrise-sunset.html).
The key excerpt is the following:
>All “twilight phenomena” are symmetric on opposite sides of midnight, and occur in reverse order between sunset and sunrise, the authors note in “Color and Light in Nature” (Cambridge University Press, 2001). That means there’s no inherent, natural cause of a major optical difference between them.
In short, in the absence of other factors (increased pollution through the day, etc) there is no real natural difference, but there may be a difference is in the observer’s awareness of the time of day and your body’s physiological response as well. For example, your eyes may be more sensitive in the morning due to being dark adapted, so your perception may be a bit different than it is in the evening.
The one thing that *is* different between sunrise and sunset is the angle at which the sun leaves/approaches the horizon:
>According to the astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, there’s also a trick for distinguishing a sunrise from a sunset played in reverse. Because of Earth’s tilt, the sun doesn’t rise or set along a vertical line, but at an angle. “When viewed from all latitudes north of the Tropic of Cancer (23.5 degrees north latitude), the sun always rises at an angle up and to the right, and sets and an angle down and to the right,” Tyson writes on his website. “That’s how you can spot a faked sunrise in a movie: it moves up and to the left. Filmmakers are not typically awake in the morning hours to film an actual sunrise, so they film a sunset instead, and then time-reverse it, thinking nobody will notice.”
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