What is the fundamental conceptual distinction between the daytime blue sky and the nighttime black sky?
Answer
The daytime sky is blue because the atmosphere is the local light source via scattering; nighttime blackness results from the lack of sufficient local scattering over the vacuum.
The daytime sky appears blue because the atmosphere actively scatters and spreads the Sun's energy toward us, making it the effective light source; the night sky appears black due to the absence of enough local energy scattering to overcome the darkness of the intervening vacuum.
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