Why the sky looks blue?

Question

Sometimes sky also appears red, yellow, orrange, pale purple, reddish brown, even pale purple colour. Why?
Why also the clouds look white? I suppose it shows transparent or pale blue color.

Answer 1

The sun's rays hit the Earth's atmosphere, where the light is scattered by nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the air. The blue wavelength of this light is affected more than the red and green wavelengths, causing the surrounding air to appear blue. At sunset, the sun's light passes farther through the atmosphere, deflecting and decreasing the blue in the air. Scattering by dust particles and pollution in the air causes the sunset to appear red.

In much the same way as why skies are blue, clouds are white because their water droplets or ice crystals are large enough to scatter the light of the seven wavelengths (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet), which combine to produce white light. Clouds will appear dark or gray when either they are in another clouds shadow or the top of a cloud casts a shadow upon its own base.

The darkness of a cloud also depends on the background sky. A cloud will look darker when it is surrounded by a bright sky and lighter when it is in front of darker ones. Not always will a dark cloud mean rain.

Answer 2

The colour of the sky depends on the scattering of colour. Imagine the earths atmosphere like a giant filter, it only lets blue light through. When the sun sets/rises then the reason it is those colours is because of dust in the atmosphere and then, for some reason i cant remember, it acts as a reddish sort of filter. It just depends on the sunlight and the atmosphere. And the reason the clouds are white is because they reflect all other colour. Thats why anything is any colour, it only allows the colour that you can see through... You get it after a while.

Answer 3

The light coming from the sun is white, which is to say all colors. As the light hit the atmosphere, scattering begins (it is called Rayleigh scattering). Now, lets say you are a molecule in the upper atmosphere. A photon of blue light hit a molecule and it scatters off in your direction. When you see this photon, which direction do you see it from? The sun, no! You see it from the direction of the first molecule. This is what happens billions of time before the light comes to the surface.

Blue and violet light are scattered more easily than red and orange, however, there is more blue light than violet light coming from the sun. Also, your senses are better at perievning blue than violet, so you see the entire sky as blue.

Unfortunatly, I can't put graphics up here, but that ought to give you a good idea.

Answer 4

Light rays from the sun. When it's day time it looks blue becuz the sun is out and the light rays from the sun are giving it a blue color. If it was not 4 the sun the sky would be completely black, like night time. When the sun sets or rises, the light rays go away from the sky which is why it gets darker when the sun sets, and vise versa when it rises. Get it?

Answer 5

When sunlight enters the earth's atmosphere the radiations with lower wavelength(or higher frequency) will be scattered more while those with higher wavelength passes without much difficulty. Blue light gets scattered more than red etc... hence sky is blue in color...

Answer 6

the light from the sun makes the sky look blue but sunlight is really a light of seven colours red orange yellow green blue indigo violet which you can see from prism. Dust and water in air scatter the blue light or make it visible, more than other colours. thats why the sky looks blue when sun shines.

Answer 7

The skies are blue because other colors can't get thru but only the blue from the sun's ray.

White clouds - they are water, just imagine what ice looks like.

Answer 8

Clouds are white because they are mad eof moisture.

The sky, is actually the earths atmosphere. It appears to be blue because the color blue has the shortest wavelength.

Answer 9

It is scattering of the ultraviolet rays and it may sound hard to believe but the different colors in the sky are from that evil POLLUTION!!!!!

Answer 10

sunlight reflecting through and on, different gases in the atmosphere