To get a good answer to that, we called in the help of Meppeler Theo Jurriëns, astronomer at the University of Groningen. He explained the way with the colors of celestial bodies such as the Moon, Mars and Venus.
What we see glistening in the sky at night, the moon and the planets, may seem to give light, but that is not the case. Unlike stars, they do not have their own energy source. They reflect the light of the sun, says Jurriëns. “The sun is our nearest star, at a distance of 150 million kilometers. Everything we see on the moon and the planets, is reflected sunlight.”
That also applies to the color. Mars, for example, we see red because the surface contains a form of rust. That iron oxide gives the planet its typical red glow. Venus is strikingly clear, and that is because the planet uses no less than seventy percent of the sunlight. The planet is often visible as a bright ‘star’ in the evening or morning sky.
And then the moon? It seems white or sometimes a little yellow, but that is deception. The color of the moonlight is in fact the same as that of sunlight. “The moon surface reflects the sunlight without really strong coloring,” Jurriëns explains. “So the moon is not white because it himself has that color, but because the sunlight that falls on it looks white for us.”
Sometimes the moon looks red, for example with sunrise or movement. That is not because of the moon itself, but because of the atmosphere of the earth. The sunlight must then travel a longer road through the atmosphere and is partly scattered, whereby the red shades remain. The same phenomenon also causes the red color of the sun during sunrise or movement.