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Asked by crouchingmurloc to Ben, Dave, Ed, Sam, Susana on 17 Jun 2013. This question was also asked by tammyp1, mhuett, swilks, lolage20, reaganbrien.
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Benjamin Hall answered on 17 Jun 2013:
Because the air scatters shorter wavelengths of light much better than it scatters longer wavelengths of light.
The shortest wavelength of light visible to humans is blue light. This is why the sky appears blue.
When the sky sometimes appears yellow, orange or red as the sun is going down, it’s because the light must travel through more of the atmosphere before it reaches our retina.
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David Briggs answered on 17 Jun 2013:
Because the molecules in the air scatter (change the direction of) blue light more than they do red light.
Sunlight is a mix of all the different colours of the rainbow (different wavelengths of light). The long wavelengths of light ( The reds, oranges and yellows) don’t get scattered very well, and continue in a straight line – the short wavelengths (blue) get scattered in every direction – so the blue component of sunlight is what we see when we look at a clear sky.
The sky around sunset looks red because the blue light has been scattered away in different directions, but the red light that doesn’t get scattered can go straight to our eyes.
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Sam Horrell answered on 17 Jun 2013:
Not much I can add to Ben and David’s answers.
It’s definitely not because the light is reflected off the oceans.
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Susana Teixeira answered on 18 Jun 2013:
The sun light contains many colors, or in other words contains waves with different lengths (wavelengths). The closer the wavelength is to the size of the particles they meet, the more likely they are to get scattered by them.
As it so happens, violet and blue ones are shorter and so these are the ones that get scattered most in the sky. Our eyes are less sensitive to violet, so we see the sky as blue. With a fair bit of clouds at the moment!
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