Photo: uggboy
There is nothing so heartwarming as a clear blue sky, but the fact that we see it that way is not necessarily anything to do with the actual color, but our human perception of it. When you know what the facts are about how we see the heavens, perhaps you might revise your ideas.
When transmitted light such as sunlight enters our atmosphere it collides with the oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The color with the shorter wavelength is scattered more by this collision. Because violet and blue are the shortest wavelengths the sky appears to be violet / blue. But because our eyes are more sensitive to blue light than they are to violet light, we perceive the sky as blue.
Photo: elsie esq
Our eyes contain thousand of rods and cones, which are the receptors for light. Whenever one of the three stooges pokes you in the eye you see a giant blue spot. This is because the blue receptors have been activated. Blue is one of the primary colors and thus more easily activated and seen by our eyes.
Blue is also how I feel when my baby leaves and my hound dog dies. Also, how I feel when the cops pull me over and I see their blue lights flashing in my rear view mirror. Then, again, blue is the color of the K-mart special, so this color isn't all bad.
Photo: stephenhanafin
Here is something interesting to think about - when you look at the nighttime sky, it's black, with the moon and stars forming points of light on that black background. So why is it that, during the day, the sky doesn't remain black? Why does the daytime sky turn a bright blue while the stars disappear?
The first thing to recognize is that the sun is an extremely bright light source - much brighter than the moon. The second thing to recognize is that nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere have an effect on the sunlight that passes through them.
Photo: mnsc
There is a physical phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering that causes light to scatter when it passes through particles that have a diameter one-tenth that of the wavelength (color) of the light. Sunlight is made up of all different colors of light, but, because of the elements in the atmosphere, the color blue is scattered much more efficiently than the other colors.
Photo: informatique
When you look at the sky on a clear day, you can see the sun as a bright disk. The blueness you see everywhere else is all of the atoms in the atmosphere scattering blue light toward you. Because red light, yellow light, green light and the other colors aren't scattered nearly as well, you see the sky as blue.
Photo: iamthetherapist
A clear cloudless daytime sky is blue because molecules in the air scatter blue light from the Sun more than they scatter red light. This scattering effect is known as Rayleigh scattering. Because the blue light is scattered in random directions, some of it reaches the planet surface, where we see it.
When we look towards the Sun at sunset, we see red and orange colors because the blue light has been scattered out (filtered) and away from our line of sight.
Photo: davidnikonvscanon
In the evening, the sky sometimes looks orange or red because of air pollution, dust, water vapor, and other floating particles in the air act as a filter on the sunlight. When the Sun is low, the air layer is thicker and the light is more filtered, so it looks yellow, orange and finally red. Light of a particular color is characterized by its frequency and wavelength. The higher the frequency, the more blue it appears.
Photo: puroticorico
Sunlight is made up of all colors that, when mixed together, produce white light. You may have seen a rainbow or the prism experiment where the white light is split up into several colors.
The Earth's atmosphere is filled with minute dust and water particles that act like a filter, scattering the light rays. The rays of light with the longer wavelengths, such as reds and yellows, tend to pass more easily through the atmosphere, while the rays with the shorter wavelengths, like blues and indigos, tend to be randomly scattered more easily. These more easily dispersed shorter light rays are what give the sky its blue color.
Photo: Colin Drake Jaramillo
Red skies at sunrise and sunset are caused by the same phenomenon. When the light hits the Earth at an angle it has more of the atmosphere to go through; this increases the filtering effect and that is why you see a red sky. So, you see, that what you think you see is not always the same as other creatures looking at the same thing. The sky is blue only because evolution gave us our limited human range of vision. Personally, I don't care if I am visually handicapped. Blue skies still make me smile!
Photo: koocbor
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