Why does the moon look orange?

From the closing credits:

The full moon sometimes looks orange when it rises because the light has to travel through more of the atmosphere than when the moon is high in the sky. The blue light waves scatter but the red light waves make it through...

...just in case you were wondering.

Also, according to Neil Armstrong, the moon really is made of cheese.





"Save me Jebus!", Homer Simpson

Curiously, the answer to this question is the same as the answer to "Why is the sky blue?", and also "Why are sunrise and sunset skies yellow?" Multispectral light, such as comes from the Sun, undergoes a phenomenon called Rayleigh Scattering as it passes through the atmosphere. The blue end of the spectrum scatters most, and the red end scatters least. When light comes in at a high angle, the blue scatters in all directions and gives us a distributed blue color in the sky. When light comes in either directly from the sun or reflected off the moon comes in at a low angle, some blue is scattered into space, and the less easily scattered warm colors get directly through to give us yellowish moons and skies. The bluish light before sunrise and after sunset is light that got scattered over the horizon while the warm colors continued straight into space. Some sources erroneously claim that the color is due to the light traveling through more dust in the atmosphere, but that's easy to refute. Next time you are in an airliner in a window seat at sunrise or sunset, you can see this effect. The airliner travels above a significant portion of the atmosphere which carries dust or water particles, but you can still see the effects of Rayleigh Scattering. Whether you see it through the eyes of a poet or those of a physicist, it is stunningly beautiful from an airliner!

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"They say the f-ing smog is the f-ing reason you have such beautiful f-ing sunsets."

-Ray Bones