Friday, April 23, 2010

Why the sky is blue??


The sky appears blue to us on a clear day, because the atoms of nitrogen and oxygen in the atmosphere separate the sun's white light into its many colors, and scatter them throughout the atmosphere.


The wavelength of the blue light scatters better than the rest, predominates over the other colors in the light spectrum, and makes the sky appear blue to us.


the amount of light scattered is inversely proportional to the fourth power of wavelength for sufficiently small particles.  It follows that blue light is scattered more than red light by a factor of (700/400)4 ~= 10.






The light spectrum ranges in wavelength from red to violet, and, since the wavelength of the blue light passes through the particles with greater ease than the wavelengths of the other colors of light, the sky appear blue to the naked eye.



human eye has three types of light receptors, known as cones, located in the retina. The 
cones are either considered to be red, or blue, or green, based upon their strong response to light at these wavelengths. As light stimulates these receptors, our vision translates the signals into the colors we see.


When gazing at the sky, the red cones respond to the small amounts of red light scattered, and even less strongly to the orange and yellow wavelengths. Although green cones respond to yellow, their response to scattered green and green-blue wavelengths is stronger. Finally, colors near the strongly scattered blue wavelengths stimulate the blue receptors.


the skylight stimulates the red and green cones almost equally, while stimulating the blue cones more strongly. For these reasons, our vision naturally adjusts as clearly as possible to separate colors.

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