Everyone appreciates a lovely blue sky on a bright day, yet many savvy individuals have puzzled over why it should be that color.
Rayleigh scattering, which occurs when light hits gases and particles in the atmosphere, accounts for this phenomenon. Light with shorter wavelengths such as blue is scattered more readily than other colors.
Rayleigh Scattering
The primary factor behind why our skies appear blue is because light is scattered more strongly when passing through our atmosphere by molecules of nitrogen and oxygen, with shorter wavelengths (blue/violet) being scattered more than longer ones (red). As Earth has an exceptionally dense atmosphere, Rayleigh Scattering dominates.
Blue light can be seen due to the accumulation of all of its scattering effects being filtered through the atmosphere in such a way as to leave only blue-hued scattered light reaching your eyes. Furthermore, color may also depend on how much scattered light has been polarized; you can easily measure this with sunglasses equipped with polarizing filters.
When light scatters randomly, its color appears white. But since light is being scattered more strongly at certain wavelengths than others, we only see blue light, and therefore see only what remains – thus why the sky appears blue and appears different when at higher altitude or when sunlight has lower in the sky. This explains why skies look different depending on whether sun rises later or sets later each day.
John Tyndall and Lord Rayleigh were the first to speculate as to why the sky is blue; their hypothesis included dust particles or droplets of water being present in the atmosphere, however later studies concluded this wasn’t necessarily the cause; air molecules themselves were to blame instead.
Rayleigh Scattering occurs when the polarization of sunlight arriving is perpendicular to its path; however, in dense gases this condition cannot be met due to closer-packed molecules; therefore another type of scattering referred to as Einstein-Smoluchowski scattering results, in which more or less preserved polarization gives sky its characteristic blue hue.
Reason being, violet is slightly shorter wavelength than blue and so only excites certain receptors in your eyes to a lesser extent, meaning less violet light reaches you eyes than its counterpart blue light, making its effect less obvious and therefore not noticeable.
Dust and Water Droplets
As sunlight enters the atmosphere, it encounters dust particles and water droplets much larger than visible light’s wavelength. When these large particles move or oscillate, they cause light from entering to become scattered – with blue and violet light scattering more than other colors, producing blue reflections; red and yellow light tends to pass more freely through air than other hues do.
Scattered light, which results from reflection of sunlight back to Earth from space, gives the sky its characteristic blue color. Any colors that do not scatter appear as pure white. If an environment were heavily polluted with dust particles or pollution then scattered light would become grayish-tinged instead of blue.
Water and dust particles act as the canvas for nature’s colorful shows. As the sun lowers in the sky, more atmospheric particles scatter blue-violet light than usual, leading it to dominate sky colors more so than shorter wavelengths like red and orange which don’t scatter as strongly due to shorter wavelengths being less exposed to our eyes’ attention spans.
Clouds provide another natural source of blue light. As sunlight passes through water droplets or ice crystals that make up clouds, they reflect it back out as blue because their molecules scatter light similarly to particles in the atmosphere. When there is too much cloud cover however, sky will often look grey rather than blue because less sunlight can pass through to reach earth.
Clouds can add color to the sky in different ways, depending on their presence and color. When there is pollution present in the atmosphere, clouds may appear yellow-orange-red; when formed from natural aerosols such as forest fire smoke or volcanic eruption releases then clouds tend to be whiter in hue.
Clouds
As sunlight enters our atmosphere around Earth, it is scattered by air molecules into many different directions. Light with shorter wavelengths such as blue is dispersed more widely than longer-wavelength ones such as red; this scattering gives rise to blue sky effects.
However, on a clear day without air pollution or dust particles to block its path, sunlight may reach your eyes directly without having to pass through layers of air molecules before hitting your retinas directly. This phenomenon occurs on sunny days.
But the air may also become filled with clouds. Clouds form when water vapor in the atmosphere condenses into droplets or ice crystals small enough to remain suspended in the atmosphere, such as droplets of raindrops or snowdrops that form droplets of precipitation that form droplets that remain suspended until rainstorms come. They may consist of water droplets, pollen or chemicals; their shapes range from patches with rounded elements or sheets without distinct structures; their colors also vary considerably.
Clouds don’t just turn the sky blue; they also transform it into its opposite, such as during sunsets or sunrises, by changing color due to various processes.
Sunlight passes through the atmosphere and is stripped of shorter wavelengths by an optical effect that scatters blue light, reaching your eyes as mostly redder hue. You can witness this if you are flying near sunset/rise when looking directly towards the sun as it sets or rises.
As soon as sunlight hits your eyes, your brain interprets signals from three types of cones (for detecting color) and monochromatic rods in your eye to give an image of sky’s overall hue: Blue is more prominently stimulated than its sister hues indigo or violet wavelengths; red-stimulated wavelengths tend to have less of an impact resulting in lighter blue skies at midday than dusk.
Other Conditions
One of the first questions most children ask their parents is why the sky is blue, yet most schools provide inaccurate answers: it is not because the ocean reflects it back, or because oxygen is blue-colored gas; rather it is due to air molecules scattering shorter wavelengths more frequently than longer ones and this causes light from them entering our eyes as blue light.
Sunlight passing through Earth’s atmosphere contains all the colors of the rainbow; however, when it reaches air molecules they tend to scatter blue and violet light more readily than other hues – resulting in direct light from high in the sky having a blue tint.
Have you seen photos taken by astronauts from space? If so, then you may have noticed that the sky on the moon appears much darker than that on Earth due to no atmosphere to disperse sunlight and our eyes not being sensitive enough to detect non-polarized light sources like our own planet? This phenomenon occurs because there’s no atmosphere surrounding the moon which disperses sunrays onto its surface and our eyes don’t perceive these wavelengths when unpolarized.
Sunrise and sunset require the sun’s light to pass through even more of the atmosphere than when it is high in the sky, meaning violet and blue wavelengths may be dispersed more quickly; conversely, redder wavelengths pass more readily, giving sky its characteristic reddish-orange hue.
Basically, without our atmosphere the sun would appear whiter and stars in the night sky brighter due to no longer having blue light scattered by atmospheric molecules; without this phenomenon our eyes wouldn’t detect its wavelength and would see only dim stars instead. Although our eyes can detect many wavelengths at once, our brains cannot differentiate them; as such a rainbow appears as one solid hue on our retinas; one exception might be when atmospheric particles such as dust or water droplets create their own individual rainbow.