The moon was rising over the mountains, aglow there opposite the lingering light of the setting sun.
Japanese space agency (Jaxa) scientists want to detect a measurable acceleration in the spacecraft as photons - the particles of light - from the Sun fall on the roughly 200-sq-m, ultra-thin sheet.
The reason astronomers want to observe reflected sunlight during the transit of Venus is to test whether they can detect the faint imprint of passage of the sun's light through the atmosphere of Venus.
The festival links yin and yang, the qualities of light and dark or cold and warmth (among others) to the waxing and waning of the sun's light.
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Several hours later, in the honey-dipped low light of the midnight sun, a polar bear was spotted on an ice floe, finishing his dinner.
Because the rims of these craters catch rays of light from the sun, this may provide sufficient illumination for the spectrometer to detect frozen water.
But it will not be, because the planets in question will all be on the far side of the sun, whose light will drown them out (except for Mars, which will be visible briefly after sunset).
These early structures are "supermassive" -- perhaps millions of times the mass of our sun -- and most of the light around them doesn't make it out of their galaxies, Schawinski said.
The flash itself is actually a second image of the sun, caused by refraction of its light through the layer of air closest to the sea.
Any practiced attendee of the Academy Awards will tell you that the best time to glide across the red carpet is at the end of arrivals time, when the setting sun casts a favorable light on those pesky wrinkles and unsightly bulges.
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The setting seems stark in the midday sun, but when the sun drops and the light shifts, a form of alchemy transforms the scene into one of sensual beauty.
Indeed, some at the meeting argued that if aliens were to use an astronomical phenomenon called gravitational lensing (in which the gravitational field of the sun bends and amplifies radio waves and light from Earth), human signals could be amplified to the point where even the light from cities would be visible.
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But astronomers have figured out a clever way for Hubble to "observe" the effects of the transit on the light from the sun: by looking at the moon.
And the sky is blue, it says, because the sun produces white light which is made up of all the colours of the rainbow.
The action of ultra-violet light from the sun on a molecule called 7-dehydrocholesterol, found in the skin, turns it into the vitamin.
Astronomers detected the new planet as it crossed the face of the distant "sun", dimming the star's light as it passed in front.
As Darwin had suggested, heat and electricity were added to the mix to mimic the effects of vulcanism and lightning (later experiments also included light of the ultraviolet variety, to represent the powerful rays of the young sun).
It was late in the afternoon, the sun just going down over the fields, the last of the light filtering through the trees and shrubs along the road by the old hospital.
Bringing more light than a traditional window that can crack or leak during typhoon season, the bottle bulbs refract the sun's rays to create 55-watts worth of light.
Sure enough, this light was bent by the mass of the sun, confirming Einstein's theory.
"Imagine you are below the shark, the shark is swimming and you have the light from the Sun coming down, " explained Dr Julien Claes, a shark biologist from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, and the lead author of the study.
Those areas reflect as much as 90% of the sun's light, whereas if you planted trees there they would reflect only about 10%.
"I was smoking outside the door when I looked up at the sky and suddenly the sky lit up with a bright light and something that looked like the sun fell somewhere to the south of Yekaterinburg, " wrote Sergei Bobunets, quoted by AFP news agency.
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The abundance of such compounds tells us that the sun grew up less than 1 light year away from a massive star that exploded.
Viewed from a distance of ten light-years, the sun's side-to-side wobble due to Jupiter causes its position to change by 1.6 thousandths of an arcsecond.
Because they are so far away, by the time their images traverse the universe at the speed of light and arrive here for Schmidt to see them, more time has passed than the Earth and the sun are old.
Seven billion light years away and with two million billion times the mass of our Sun, the cluster was nicknamed "El Gordo" - "the Fat One" in Spanish.
The sun provided much needed light, and the full realization of what had happened was setting in.
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At sunset, the sun appears red (the blue light has been scattered out of that image, too), so the cells of the eye that detect red are overloaded and incapable of registering weaker red signals.
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