As we now enter the summer months, we tend to spend more time outdoors in the warmth and sun. It is during these times that I often find myself gazing into the blue sky and admiring the golden rays of sunlight.
The blue sky and yellow sun are things I always appreciate seeing — but would you believe me if I told you that that is not what you are truly seeing when you look into the sky?
Yes, the sky does appear blue and the sun does appear yellow, but that is all technically an illusion. In actuality, the sky, which is to say the atmosphere, is mostly colorless. The sky only appears blue because of the sun. The majority of the gasses, such as nitrogen and oxygen, in the atmosphere scatter higher electromagnetic-frequencies (such as blue and violet) from the sun.
Most of the remaining, lower-frequency rays pass straight through the atmosphere, which you perceive as the point of light we often think of as the sun, however, these lower frequencies (such as red, orange, yellow, and green) are only part of the sun.
If you were to see the sun without an atmosphere to scatter the light, the sun would appear white. That’s right, the sun is white! The reason the atmosphere can split the sun’s white light into different colors is because what we call white light is truly not a single color, but a combination of all the colors of the visible spectrum.
Furthermore, the sun changes color as it rises and sets because the sunlight has to travel through more atmosphere to reach your eyes when it is lower in the sky, resulting in the scattering of more frequencies, which nudges the perceived color closer to the lowest visible frequency of light (red).
What color did you think the sun was?
Onward American 