Why the sky is blue?

Why is the sky on our planet bluea shade, but, say, not pink, green or yellow? In ancient Greece, it was believed that the presence of blue in the sky is due to the fact that the sky is made of special crystal with azure tint. During the Middle Ages, it was believed that a blue tint appeared due to a mixture of black and white, and only in the 18th century, the brilliant Isaac Newton made the assumption that the blue color appears as a result of the reflection of light from the smallest droplets of water floating in the atmosphere. The last word on the question of why planet Earth is surrounded by a bluish rather than red or yellow haze was given to the English physicist John William Strett, who in the distant 1899 proved that the color of the sky directly depends on the wavelength of light emitted by the Sun and the intensity of scattering rays in the atmosphere of the planet.

In ancient times, it was believed that the sky was made of pure crystal with an azure tinge.

Why is the sky not red?

Although the main color of the skyIt is considered blue, many of us know and saw with our own eyes that in reality the sky is able to show much more complex shades. So, the evening sky can often be seen pink, although on a cloudy morning of the same day the sky had only a palette in gray tones. Residents of the northern regions are much more likely to see the sky is milky white than blue, and residents of the southern regions can watch bright orange sunsets.

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The mechanism for the appearance of different shades of the sky is simple. The sun's rays are white in color, which is refracted by the smallest droplets of water in the atmosphere. Due to the fact that the white color includes all the colors of the rainbow, when it is refracted, it breaks up into different colors. But why, then, is the main color of the sky blue?

The fact is that each color has its owna specific wavelength, depending on which light is scattered. Colors such as green, yellow, orange, and red are scattered at a much lower intensity than blue or violet, which makes blue the only suitable color in the middle of these extremes.

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Why is the sky colorful?

The sky is not only blue

Sometimes it happens that because of the content inatmosphere of relatively large particles of water, the sky scatters light waves with greater intensity, which leads to the fact that we can observe a milky-white sky.

At the same time, at sunset we often becomewitnesses of the passage through the earth's atmosphere of longer wavelength radiation in red-orange tones. A similar effect occurs because at the moment when the Sun is hiding behind the horizon, the light from our luminary travels a much greater distance in the atmosphere than in the daytime. Scattering along the path, cyan and blue colors decay into weaker red and orange in intensity, turning the sky into a colorful landscape.