Why is the sky blue detailed

When the Sun is high in the sky, this is why the entire sky is blue. It appears a brighter blue the farther away from the Sun you look, because there's more atmosphere to see and therefore more blue light in those directions. In any direction you look, you can see the scattered light coming from the sunlight striking the entirety of the atmosphere between your eyes and where outer space begins. This has a few interesting consequences for the color of the sky, depending on where the Sun is and where you're looking.

From very high altitudes in the pre-sunrise or post-sunset skies, a spectrum of colors can be seen, If the Sun is below the horizon, the light all has to travel through large amounts of atmosphere.

The bluer light gets scattered away , in all directions, while the redder light is far less likely to get scattered, meaning it arrives at your eyes. If you're ever up in an airplane after sunset or before sunrise, you can get a spectacular view of this effect.

It's an even better view from space, from the descriptions and also the images that astronauts have returned. With a large amount of atmosphere to pass through, light from the Sun or Moon reddens tremendously Farther away from the Sun, the sky turns gradually bluer. While the blue light gets scattered in all directions, the red light scatters much less efficiently. This means that both the light from the Sun's or Moon's disk itself turns a reddish color, but also the light from the vicinity of the Sun and Moon — the light that hits the atmosphere and scatters just once before reaching our eyes — is preferentially reddened at that time.

The total eclipse, as seen in Madras, Oregon in this picture, resulted in not only a spectacular And during a total solar eclipse, when the Moon's shadow falls over you and prevents direct sunlight from hitting large sections of the atmosphere near you, the horizon turns red, but no place else. The light striking the atmosphere outside the path of totality gets scattered in all directions, which is why the sky is still visibly blue in most places. But near the horizon, that light that gets scattered in all directions is very likely to get scattered again before it reaches your eyes.

The red light is the most likely wavelength of light to get through, eventually surpassing the more-efficiently-scattered blue light. Leave a comment! Enter your keywords. Sign-Up Here. Ada McVean B. General Science. AdaMcVean Leave a comment! The light you see is just one tiny bit of all the kinds of light energy beaming around the Universe - and around you!

Like energy passing through the ocean, light energy travels in waves, too. What makes one kind of light different from others is its wavelength - or range of wavelengths. Visible light includes the wavelengths our eyes can see.

The longest wavelengths we can see look red to us. The shortest wavelengths we can see look blue or violet. The wavelengths in this picture are not to scale. A red light wave is about nanometers, while a blue or violet wave is about nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. Just like our atmospheric particles, they are scattering blue light the most. And as a result the whole tank is glowing blue. Because everywhere, the milk particles are mostly throwing blue light towards us.

Beautiful, isn't it? But did you notice, as the sky became blue, the sun turned yellow? Why did it turn yellow? Well, if you come back over here, the initial incoming rays are white.

But once it hit the atmospheric particles, they start scattering blue light. So from the incoming light, blue got scattered away. So if you look at the colors that are remaining now in this incoming light, violet was never there in the first place, not much, indigo blue got scattered away, so now the incoming rays only contain green, yellow, orange, and red.

Even these are being scattered, but not as much as blue. So when we combine these colors together, we get that yellowish glow. And that's why the sunlight now, once it has entered the atmosphere, only retained that yellowish glow.

Because most of the blue has been scattered away. That's why when we look in the direction of the sun, the sun starts looking yellow to us. The same thing is happening in our experiment as well.

All right. Finally, what happens during the sunset or the sunrise? Well, the effect or the concept is pretty much the same. The only difference now is that the sun is near the horizon. So let's say the sun is somewhere over here. Then the rays of sunlight makes its way through the atmosphere reaching us. Notice now it's passing through a much longer part of an atmosphere compared to before. And so by the time this light reaches our eyes, not only is the blue light being scattered away, but pretty much the green and yellow is also gone because it's hitting so many more atmospheric molecules.

So the only color that survives are the long wavelengths which get scattered the least, that is orangeish-red. Therefore, by the time this light reaches us, it's going to look pretty much orangeish-red.

We can see the same thing in our experiment as well.