I tried learning about the Raleigh Effect but it goes over my head.
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Three things!
1. First, the light from the sun actually contains a little more blue and violet light than the other colors. When you look directly at it, it “maxes out” your receptors so it looks white, but still, the blue/violet irradiance is higher.
2. Second, light going through air molecules is like an animal walking through gravel. If you have short legs, and take little tiny steps (think of an ant walking through gravel) then you have to change direction and double back all the time; if you’re bigger, you aren’t affected as much, and if you’re a giraffe with great big legs, you blow through gravel and don’t even notice. Light is like that! The short wavelengths (blue/violet) bounce around the most in the air, yellow and green bounce less, red and orange tend to go through the straightest. The bouncing around is called Rayleigh scattering, and it means red/orange from the sun comes straight at you, but the blue/violet bounces around a lot and makes the air glow mostly blue/violet.
3. Our eyes are more sensitive to blue than they are to violet, so when the air glows blue and violet we mostly just see the blue.
Net result of all of that: when we look at the sky we get a little bit of every color, from scattered light, but we detect more blue than anything else. “A little bit of every color” we see as white, and white + blue results in the light blue we see.
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