What causes us to see the colors differently and why does it happen?
In: Physics
A white sheet of paper looks white because it scatters all of the light that hits it. A red sheet of glass looks red because only red light passes through it.
So what if there was a kind of paper that only scatters blue light, but let red light through? If it was between you and a light, it’d look red, but you were on the same side as the light it would look blue. Our atmosphere is similar. It scatters blue and passes red, so the sky looks blue but the sun itself looks yellow or red. At a shallow enough angle, it passes through way more air, so it looks more red, to the point where even a bit of the scattered red light starts to stand out over the regular blue of the sky).
The air reflects blue light. If you look at the sky during the day, you can see the blue light being reflected at you. But at sunset, when you look towards the Sun, the blue light is being reflected away from you.
It’s all about Rayleigh scattering. The shorter blue wavelengths get scattered more, so when the sun is low, we see those warm reds and oranges.
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