If you are standing on the moon, the sky would always appear black, whether it was night or day. This is because there is no atmosphere to scatter sunlight. On Earth, atoms of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere have an effect on sunlight passing through them. Light scatters when it passes through particles that are one tenth as large as the light’s wavelength. The atoms of oxygen and nitrogen are one tenth the size of the blue wavelength, so blue light is scattered more effectively than other colours.
We see the sky as colored because our atmosphere interacts with the sunlight passing through it. This phenomenon is called “scattering.” The type of scattering responsible for blue sky is known as Rayleigh scattering. Because this effect becomes sharply more pronounced as the energy of light increases, wavelengths at the blue end of the spectrum, where energy is the highest, are scattered preferentially. The sunlight reaching our eyes has a high ratio of short, bluish wavelengths compared to medium and long wavelengths, so we perceive the sky as being blue.
Without an atmosphere the sky appears black, as evidenced by the lunar sky in pictures taken from the moon. But even a black sky has some lightness. At night, the sky always has a faint color, called “skyglow” by astronomers. Much of this skyglow is light pollution – sources of light prevalent in urban areas that reduce our ability to see stars, planets, and other celestial phenomena.
In the absence of light from human sources, skyglow is present due to a faint airglow in the upper atmosphere (a permanent, low-grade aurora) and starlight scattered in the atmosphere. Even beyond our atmosphere, faint skyglow is caused by sunlight reflected off interplanetary dust (zodiacal light), and background light from faint, unresolved stars and nebulosity.