Speaker:
Joseph Shaw, ECE Department, MSU

Title:
The digital blue sky at night

Abstract:
Although your eyes cannot see it, the nighttime sky with a full moon has the same blue color as the daytime sky, caused by Rayleigh scattered moonlight. After spending many hours over the last decade photographing the blue night sky on film, in the last year and a half I discovered that digital cameras capture the same scene with shorter exposures. This talk reviews the fundamental physics of why the moonlit night sky is blue, teaches how to calculate the photographic exposure for the blue sky at night, and explains the results of a side-by-side comparison of film and digital night-sky photography.

Host:
Charles Kankelbor