Lately, I’ve been extremely fascinated by the colors of the
sky. As the weather gets colder and the sky starts getting more gloomy
the sun makes the sky light up in purple with shades of pink and orange to
match the fall leaves who are now filling the ground to add a crunch to our, loud and obvious, footstep.
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| Incline, NV 11/9/2014 @ sunset |
As a child I’ve always questioned the sky’s blue color;
people have always said it’s only a reflection from the ocean’s blue water, but
I’ve been confused growing up. We didn’t live close to an ocean only lakes and
rivers-- why is it so blue? I’d understand if it's blue near the coast, but why
here in the valley?
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| Farmside 11/10/2014 sunset |
“A clear cloudless day-time sky is blue because molecules in
the air scatter blue light from the sun more than they scatter red light. When
we look towards the sun at sunset, we see red and orange colors because the
blue light has been scattered out and away from the line of sight (Gibbs).”
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| Santa Cruz 11/5/2014 afternoon |
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| SF coast 11/8/2014 afternoon |
The sun gives out a white light that's a combination of all
the colors of the rainbow. Isaac Newton, who used a prism to separate the
different colors of the spectrum, demonstrated the mixture of the colors. Each
color has a different wavelength and they are based on visibility of the human
eye. The color ranges from red light to violet and having orange, green, blue,
and indigo in between. Our three color receptors in our eye is what give us our
color vision by responding mostly to the red, green and blue wavelengths.
John Tyndall examined when light is passed through a clear
fluid that holds small particles in suspension, shorter blue wavelengths are
scattered more strongly than the red. By shining a white light through a tank
of water mixed in with a little bit of milk or soap, this is shown, the white
light is seen by the blue light it scatters; however the light seen directly at
the end is red after it passes through the tank (Gibbs).
Have you ever worn polarized sunglasses and looked up at the
sky and noticed the sky turn into a deeper blue? That is due to scattered light
being filtered through a polarized light and coming off as restricted to show a
deeper blue instead of the light blue.
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| SF 11/7/2014 sunset |
Lord Rayleigh reveals the amount of light scattered is in
opposite proportion to the fourth power of wavelength for small particles; blue
light is scattered more than red by a factor of (700/400)4 ~= 10 (Gibbs).
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| SF sunset on the coast 11/7/2014 |
“Tyndall and Rayleigh thought that the blue colour of the
sky must be due to small particles of dust and droplets of water vapour in the
atmosphere. Even today, people sometimes incorrectly say that this is the case.
Later scientists realised that if this were true, there would be more variation
of sky colour with humidity or haze conditions than was actually observed, so
they supposed correctly that the molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in the air
are sufficient to account for the scattering (Gibbs).”
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| Corn Maize 10/29/2014 sunset |
My research led me to conclude my thinking into believing
that one little impact as small and touching as a footstep coming together can
cause such a huge impact. This impact being all the separate colors and
molecules that come together to create the blue shading in the sky.
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| Santa Cruz University 11/5/2014 |
I’ve followed this into my daily life, where as little as
one plastic bottle I choose to either drop in a trashcan or recycling bin can
have an impact, of maybe even years for that matter. Imagine, every person walking an extra footstep to drop their bottle into a recycling bin, how much lanfill space it can save us; not to mention how much healthier our bodies and the planet can be.
For instance, as much as a small assignment, even if I
considered it just "busy work," can have an impact on my grade or
life. Taking that extra leap, staying up ten minutes longer if needed to, just
to finish the final paragraph, taking my time and think about my thinking --
those ten minutes can be equivalent to the next ten months of my life. A great
mentor and role model of mine as a child always said, "If you're going to
do something, you better do it right." What he meant by that was; "be
proud of what you are and what you do; you want everything you do to represent
yourself, and as a person, you are better than half-assed work."
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| SF sewage "No Dumping" 11/8/2014 |
Nature, to spite the struggles it's put through, doesn’t
fail to come out on top. Nature doesn’t rush, yet everything seems to get accomplished. The sky doesn’t rush its sunset. Nature takes the time to
perfectly time it as it continues to go down and light bends behind the horizon
to make new shades every second of every minute.
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| Sunset over SCU 11/5/2014 |
Work Cited
Gibbs, Philip. "Why is the sky blue?" The Physics and Relativity. N.p. May 1997. Web. 13 Nov. 2014.
