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Blue or black sky?
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Mars
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Do it yourself
A brilliant red sunset fading into a bruised purple afterglow conjures up images of tropical
paradise and romance, while the blue sky on a sunny day can put a bounce in your step. In
fact, both are caused by light scattering through particles in the air.
Blue wavelengths are generally scattered down toward the earth. This makes the sky appear
blue wherever it is daytime and the sun is high in the sky. At sunset, however, the opposite
occurs.
Purple light can sometimes be observed in the west 15 to 30 minutes after sunset.
Glowing beam of the "bat signal", shown as imagined in a 1950s comic book cover. In
reality, rays of light are invisible in the vacuum of space. In the earths atmosphere, however,
the rays of our sun are faintly visible, spanning across our planet and appearing as a blue sky.
Leonardo da Vinci observed that a very fine water spray produced light scattering, but for
many centuries only confusing and misleading theories abounded.
The English experimentalist John Tyndall (1820-1893) demonstrated that the scattering
from particles that are small compared to the wavelength of light is wavelength-dependant,
with blue being much more strongly scattered than red.
form of electromagnetic radiation, and so has electric and magnetic field components. These
fields oscillate as sinusoidal waves (waves in an undulating form with crests and troughs).
The electric and magnetic field components are always in planes perpendicular to each other
and in phase. Raleigh light scattered at 90 degrees is fully polarized, whereas at other angles
it is only partly polarized.
Sunlight will consist of rays with the electric and magnetic field components in varying
directions (not polarized), but because Rayleigh scattering occurs preferentially in one plane,
the blue scattered light we see is polarized, perpendicular to the direction of the suns rays.
Sometimes the initial scattered light is scattered again, so partial randomizing of the
polarization occurs.