Why does the Moon appear in different shades? 

To start with, the Moon does not have light of its own. It reflects light from the Sun, and sunlight contains all the colours of the visible spectrum—from violet to red. 🌈 (In case you didn’t know, that is exactly why a rainbow is made up of rainbow colours 😊)        

Our Moon can look remarkably different from one night to another. Sometimes it takes on beautiful shades of orange, red or even yellow, depending on where it is in the sky and the conditions of our atmosphere. It is to be noted that the Moon itself never changes colour – in fact it is a dusty grey world. 

Then what could be causing the colour change? The answer is our atmosphere. As the Moon rises close to the horizon, its light has to travel through a much thicker layer of Earth’s atmosphere. The atmosphere scatters and absorbs more of the shorter blue wavelengths of light, allowing more of the red and orange light to reach our eyes. The result can be a Moon that looks surprisingly different from the familiar bright, silvery disk we usually see.