Why is sometimes the night sky is like a pale orange or a dark blue color, even sometimes is purple, why is that?
In: Earth Science
The blue, orange, red and purple colors in the sky are all colors from the sun. They look like that because of the something called the atmosphere and something called refraction.
You know how the sun looks white?
In the day, when the sun is high up in the sky and everything is bright outside, the sun looks like it is completely white.
The sun isn’t really white.
The sun shines with a lot of different colors all at once, and when all the colors shine at you from above, it looks completely white.
It’s kind of like the colors on a TV set in a house far away.
Maybe you have seen a house where the TV was on at night? If so, it probably looked all blue or white, even though the people in the house must have been looking at something with colors on the TV.
The sun is like that. It looks white when all the colors get mixed up together. The sun doesn’t show pictures though. It only shows a colored, bright light.
Have you ever seen yellow sunglasses? Or maybe even the red ones? They will have a shadow that is yellow or red but the sunglasses are not really creating that color. They are removing or stopping some colors from the sun, like blue and green, so that the only colors left in the shadow are the yellow or the red.
So the yellow light and the red light both come from the sun, even in the daytime.
The sunglasses have very flat, transparent surfaces. Even though some are round and some are more like squares or even star-shaped, they are all very flat like the glass in a window. If you have a piece of glass that isn’t flat, but shaped like a triangle or a pyramid or a droplet of water, the shadow would be a bit different. It would look more like a rainbow, because the different colors bounce in different directions when they shine through something that isn’t flat.
It is not easy to see this rainbow shadow in the daytime because the colors get mixed in with all the colors of the sun and then it looks white again — just like the sun.
Have you ever seen a big rainbow high up in the sky, or a small rainbow near a waterfall or near a lawn sprinkler? Rainbows are pure light from the sun that gets twisted and bent when it hits the tiny drops of water in the air.
In the evening, the light gets twisted like that because it hits the atmosphere around the earth. The atmosphere is the air that we breathe, and it is all around the world, in all the countries and above all the seas. But the atmosphere is not out in space, it is just sticking aruond the earth, just like an orange peel around an orange, but it is transparent, like air.
So, in the evening, some of the colors from the sun gets bounced away by the shield so you can’t see them. It’s like you are inside the rainbow and you are walking away from the blue and green so that all you can see is the orange, yellow and red.
When the sun goes lower, more colors bounce away and the only colors left are the red ones before it gets all dark.
Some evenings are purple because the red light mixes with the blue sky.
The blue sky is really blue light from the sun. The blue color is special because it bounces around inside the atmosphere and makes the sky look blue all around. This makes the sky look pale blue in the day, and it makes the sky look more purple than red in the evening.
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