After this lengthy disclaimer, I come to the point. After the thunderstorm yesterday, the sky took on that peculiar goldish-pinkish hue that it sometimes gets after an evening storm. This led me to check out Wiki for info on the sky.
As you may know, the sky is really not blue. It just looks blue. Blue light is color that appears dominant to us due to an effect called Rayleigh scattering. There is a complicated formula and some genius named John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh, figured out that
sunlit sky is blue because air scatters short-wavelength light more than longer wavelengths. Since blue light is at the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, it is more strongly scattered in the atmosphere than long wavelength red light.
[...]
Near sunrise and sunset, most of the light we see comes in nearly tangent to the Earth's surface, so that the light's path through the atmosphere is so long that much of the blue and even green light is scattered out, leaving the sun rays and the clouds it illuminates red. Therefore, when looking at the sunset and sunrise, you will see the color red more than any of the other colors.
So the pinkish-golden light that follows a late-day storm is the combination of the blue and green light getting scattered off due to the time of day and the clouds dimming and diffusing effects.
Or something like that.
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