Elements of Light which Create Blue Skies and Red Sunsets
Throughout history, many people have wondered exactly what makes the sky blue and what makes some sunsets red. This can be done by examinations on how the scattering of sunlight by the Earth's atmosphere produces blue skies and red sunsets. Red sunsets have also been called orange sunsets because they are actually more orange in color.
Blue Skies
To understand why the sky is blue, one needs to understand a little about light. Light is a form of radiation, electromagnetic energy that travels in the form of waves possessing electric and magnetic properties. This form of energy does not need matter to propagate. We can characterize this energy by its wavelength -- the distance along a wave from one crest to another. Our eyes are remote sensors that are sensitive to light with wavelengths between approximately 0.4-0.7 microns (one micron is a millionth of a meter or one one-hundredth the diameter of a human hair).
When light interacts with objects that are much smaller than the wavelength of the light, the light being scattered, rather than reflected. The electrons of such a small object are all shaken up and down at the same time by the electric field of the light wave, and they radiate that frequency of light in all directions. It turns out that the higher the frequency of the light, the more the light is scattered.
The diameter of most molecules is much smaller than the wavelengths of visible light. A thin protective layer of ozone gas in the upper atmosphere absorbs most of the ultraviolet light from the sun, and the remaining ultraviolet sunlight that passes through the atmosphere is scattered by atmospheric particles and molecules. Of the visible frequencies of light, the high-frequency violet is scattered the most, followed by blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, in the order of decreasing frequency. Red is scattered less than a tenth as much as violet. Although violet light is scattered more than blue, our eyes are not very sensitive to violet and there tends to be more blue light in sunlight than violet. The blue predominates in our vision, so we see a blue sky.
Red Sunsets
Since the lower frequencies of light are scattered the least by nitrogen and oxygen molecules (the primary components of our atmosphere), red, orange, green, and yellow light are transmitted through the atmosphere much more than violet and blue.
A spectrum is a group of light wavelengths that are ordered in relation to their wavelength length. The electromagnetic spectrum consists radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma rays. (1)Specifically, this lab looks at the visible light part of the spectrum because one of the colors in the visible light spectrum is shine through the sample. The visible light spectrum consists of colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The color chosen to be shine through the sample is affected by the color of sample when mixed with the indicator Ammonium Vanadomolybdate (AMV). The color on the color wheel that is opposite of the solution’s color is the color that is shined through the
...nd violet wavelengths are the shortest, and violet is the least visible to the human eye. These wavelengths are scattered throughout the day and caused by a redirection of the light-waves direction due to gas molecules in the atmosphere (Mc Knight, p. 84). When the sun is setting towards the end of the day there are few blue wavelengths left and we see orange and red which are dominant and the longest wavelengths of visible light to the human eye. At the bottom of the photo (closest to the setting sun) red and orange are the dominant visible colors with the occasional blue and almost violet. If our eyes could not see orange and red our sunsets would be a dark blue or black.
For example, if a star has a blue magnitude of 5 and a visual magnitude of 3, then it has a color index of 2. Color indices range from about -0.5 for the bluest stars t...
Most of the light energy from the sun is emitted in wavelengths shorter than 4,000
When shown a colour spectrum besides blue and purple, Dalton was only able to recognise one other colour, yellow. Or as he says?that part of the image which others call red appears to me little more than a shade or deflect of light. After that the orange, yellow and green seem one colour which descends pretty uniformly from an intense to a rare yellow, making what I should call different shades of yellow. In 1801 he argued that the atmosphere was filled with mechanical gases and that the chemical reactions between the nitrogen and oxygen played no part in the atmosphere?s construction. To prove this, he conducted a lot of experiments on the solubility of gases in water.
Light is both part particle and part wave. Light is “the electromagnetic radiation that may be perceived by the human eye”. It consists of photons, which are massless bundles of concentrated electromagnetic energy. Light’s lower frequency is red, and the higher frequency is blue. Like sound, light has frequencies humans can’t detect. Ultraviolet light is at a frequency higher than violet, and infrared is at the frequency lower than the red of visible light. We get UV (ultraviolet) rays from the sun, and infrared is used in night vision to see better.
Photosynthesis is, “the process by which plants convert light energy from the Sun into chemical energy in the form of carbohydrates” thus producing, “food for all living organisms, directly or indirectly” (Zheng). Photosynthesis has been examined in thousands of different ways. Many of these experiments include studying the rate of photosynthesis and pigment accumulation by obtaining plants and then stressing their light and nutrient intake (Okunlola and Adekunle). Photosynthetic pigments reflect and absorb different wavelengths of visible light based off their polarity. In this experiment, we studied photosynthetic pigments, first, by determining polarity and then, by measuring the amount of light of a given wavelength that a pigment absorbs. We used two methods in this experiment, chromatography and spectrophotometry. Chromatography “is a method used to separate mixtures of substances into their components” (lab book) and spectrophotometry is the use of a spectrophotometer to measure transmittance of light through a liquid. We used our knowledge of polarity to predict that since the least polar pigments move the most, pigment 1 is chlorophyll b, pigment 2 is chlorophyll a, pigment 3 is an anthocyanin, pigment 4 is a xanthophyll, and since most polar pigments move the least, pigment 5 is
Have you ever wondered why yellow makes you irritated? Why purple makes you feel happy? Why green calms you? Why orange helps you feel energized? Many people think that colors are just colors. But in reality, colors have been useful throughout the years as they have an huge impact on our lives. Many of us need to be aware of colors that surround us in everyday life.
Throughout different experiments, scientists have discovered that light behaves as both a wave and a particle in different circumstances. The only way that all of the properties of light can be explained is through the idea of a wave-particle duality.
There is an abundance of ways light and color can play tricks with how your body thinks. Color has an impact on everything. When you walk into a restaurant and instantly become hungry is one way that color has an influence. When you feel antsy in one room and calm in the other is another way that color has an effect, this is all because of the atmosphere of that room, which is altered by color.
Light is what lets you experience colour. The pigment of the retina in your eyes is sensitive to different lengths of light waves which allows you to see different colours. The wavelengths of light that humans can see are called the visible colour spectrum.
we can’t see in the UV spectrum, and there are other animals such as butterflies which have 4 or 5 different photoreceptor types and can see more colors than us
...e sun, this is of a longer wavelength and is absorbed by the atmosphere. The Earths atmosphere, thus acts like the glass of a green house, hence the 'greenhouse effect'.
atmosphere. If there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere more rays from the sun are