Why do we get different colored sunsets from time to time?
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TLDR: The atmosphere isn’t perfectly uniform. There will be different densities of air and there may be other particulates in the air that will change how the sunlight gets reflected which results in different colors perceived by our eyes.
The sky is blue because the atmosphere scatters light from the Sun. Scatter is essentially just light bouncing and reflecting off particles. It just so happens that shorter wavelength light (blue light) scatters more than longer wavelengths (red light).
At sunsets, the Sun is on the horizon and because its on the horizon and not directly above you, the sunlight has more atmosphere to travel through. Turns out, this extra distance essentially filters out the blue light since it gets scattered so much, leaving only the light that hasn’t been scattered, which is the red light.
But the atmosphere isn’t perfectly uniform. There will be different densities of air at different places or perhaps different molecular compositions of the air. This will change the scattering of the light. Different scattering will result in different sunset colors.
Also, a side note unrelated to sunsets: You may have noticed that fog lights on cars are generally a yellowish-orange color rather than the traditional white or blue color for the high/low beams. This is because yellow and orange light have longer wavelengths than blue light. And when you are driving through fog, you don’t want a bunch of light being reflected by the fog and clouding your vision. The lower wavelength light are better at traveling through the fog and not getting reflected by it, which allows the driver to see the road and surroundings better.
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