Red Sunset

Sunsets are reddened because for sun positions which are very low or just below the horizon,
the light passing at grazing incidence upon the earth must pass through a greater thickness of
air than when it is overhead. Just before the sun disappears from view, its actual position is
about a diameter below the horizon, the light having been bent by refraction to reach our eyes.
Since short wavelengths are more efficiently scattered by Rayleigh scattering, more of them
are scattered out of the beam of sunlight before it reaches you. Aerosols and particulate
matter contribute to the scattering of blue out of the beam, so brilliant reds are seen when
there are many airborne particles, as after volcanic eruptions.

The equivalent phenomenon can be seen at sunrise

This shows an early morning sun with the exposure dark enough so
that the light from the Sun does not saturate the CCD detector. The
color is indeed very red.

When an attempt was made to lighten the image so

that the surroundings could be seen, the light from the
Sun saturated the medium and appeared white.
 This image of the red morning sun was
shot about 7:30 AM near Atlanta. A
small amount of morning fog enhanced
the red by Rayleigh scattering out more
blue, I am guessing. Successive
exposures at about 1 stop difference
were taken and the sun from the darker
one transferred over the sun image in the
lighter one.

The redness of the sun is about as it appeared to the eye, but the remainder of the sky is much
darker than it appeared to the eye, pointing to the remarkable contrast handling ability of
human vision.

The blue color of the sky is caused by the scattering of sunlight off the molecules of the atmosphere. This sca
the sun's light is predominantly in the blue end of the spectrum.
 Note that the blue of the sky is more saturated wh

Clouds in contrast to the blue sky appear white to achromatic gray.

The water droplets that make up the cloud are much larger than the molecules of the air and the scattering fro

HyperPhysics***** Light and Vision R Nave

The next time you watch the Sun descend through the sky, towards the horizon, you might
marvel at how the Sun remains the same size all the way down. At just slightly over half-a-
degree, the Sun appears to drop at a constant rate throughout the afternoon and into early
evening.

But there are some small changes that are extremely important if you want to understand the
beauty behind the sunset.
Image credit: Tamas Ladanyi (TWAN), over Lake Balaton, Hungary.

The first and most obvious is the change in coloration of the Sun, as well as a severe drop in
the Suns brightness. On an airless world like the Moon, the Sun at sunset would look no
different than at any other time. But its the Earths atmosphere that makes sunsets so special.

Image credit: Bob King of http://astrobob.areavoices.com/.

When the Sun appears progressively lower and lower on the horizon, its light needs to pass
through more and more of the atmosphere to reach our eyes. You might not think of the
atmosphere as being a very good prism, but when you pass through around 1000 miles of it
just before the Sun dips below the horizon, it starts to add up.

Image credit: Pete Lawrence (Digital-Astronomy).

The bluer wavelengths of light get scattered away, leaving only the reddest wavelengths that
reach your eye. As the sun drops towards the horizon, it progressively loses violets and blues,
then greens and yellows, and finally even the oranges, leaving only the reds behind.

You may not even realize it, but by time youd see a sunset like the picture above, the Sun
has already technically set, its only due to the fact that the atmosphere bends light that were
still seeing it like this.

Image credit: R Nave of Hyperphysics.

This is why, if you time a sunset, it will take longer than the expected 120 seconds to go from
the moment it touches the horizon to the moment it dips below, even during the equinox at
the equator, where it rises and sets as close to completely vertical to the horizon as possible.
The Sun appears to linger due to the refraction of our atmosphere.

Also, despite its red appearance, there really still is blue and green light coming from the Sun,
of course, while this is going on. But these shorter (i.e., bluer) wavelengths refract
slightly more than the lower frequency ones, meaning that the reds come in at a different,
shallower angle than the greens and blues, that come in at a slightly steeper angle.

Image credit: R Nave of Hyperphysics.

Given a clear path to the horizon such as over the ocean this means that theres a slight
region of space just above the reddened Sun where only the shorter wavelength light is
visible!

And when that happens, in addition to the normal color gradient that comes with a sunset,
you can also get a small, separate region above the disk of the Sun that appears yellow, green,
or even blue!
Image credit: ESO Photo Ambassador Gianluca Lombardi. As always, click to enlarge.

This optical phenomena is always most clearly visible over a flat area in pollution-free skies,
and is known as the green flash. It occurs in many different stages, sometimes appearing at
the limb of the Sun or just above it, but most it commonly appears just after the disk of the
Sun has set, in a literal flash lasting just a few seconds, just barely above the horizon.

Image credit: Emil Ivanov, in Tel Aviv.

Although theres a lot of green light in the Sun, the bluest wavelengths refract even more than
the green ones do. In principle, you could get a flash of any wavelength yellow, green,
blue, or even violet if the atmosphere cooperated. Although green and yellow flashes are
the most common, under just the right atmospheric conditions, you can see even blue
colors flashing at a high angle above the top of the Sun!

Image credit: Mario Cogo.

This applies to any very bright, white-light object that encounters our atmosphere as seen just
barely above the horizon. So that means the Moon, which reflects sunlight back at us,
should also exhibit a green flash under the right atmospheric conditions. And although Ive
never seen it with my own eyes, some diligent astrophotographers have captured the sight to
share with us all.
Image credit: Laurent Laveder (PixHeaven.net / TWAN).

You may be wondering, if greens and blues appear slightly above the disk of the Sun (or
Moon), could we ever see a red flash slightly below the disk?

Under just the right, favorable atmospheric conditions, thats exactly what happens!
Image credit: Stefan Seip.

Way back on the old blog (some four years ago), I posted a short explanation of the green
flash, and little did I know that years later, I would receive the following message from Don
Arnold of Chattanooga, TN:

I thought this was a hoax every time I visit Costa Mesa..so last week we were on the costa
mesa pier and had my good Nikon set the motor drive to max and took 30 frames right at
sunset. So I think I have a good one. You will have to zoom in but it looks goodthanks for
the great explanation on this!

Here was the image he enclosed.

Image credit: Don Arnold.

And here is the zoomed-in-version (my apologies for my lousy image processing skills):

Image credit: Don Arnold.

The sunset is beautiful to anyones eyes, and the clarity or dustiness of the horizon, the
quality and turbulence of the atmosphere, and position of the Sun give us a great diversity of
beautiful sights.
But when you see a color gradient on the Sun, a red lip at the bottom, or a yellow, green, or
blue rim at or above the top, will you see less beauty or more for having read and understood
this? To me, at least, everything is more beautiful the more you know. Thanks for sharing the
beautiful physics of sunsets with me!
Rayleigh scattering refers to the scattering of light off of the molecules of the air, and can be
extended to scattering from particles up to about a tenth of the wavelength of the light. It is
Rayleigh scattering off the molecules of the air which gives us the blue sky.
Blue Sky and Rayleigh Scattering - HyperPhysics
hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/.../blusky.htm...
Georgia State University
Refraction can create a spectrum

Isaac Newton performed a famous experiment using a triangular block of glass called a prism.
He used sunlight shining in through his window to create a spectrum of colours on the
opposite side of his room.

Image: Prism

This experiment showed that white light is actually made of all the colours of the rainbow.
These seven colours are remembered by the acronym ROY G BIV red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo and violet.

Newton showed that each of these colours cannot be turned into other colours. He also
showed that they can be recombined to make white light again.

The explanation for the colours separating out is that the light is made of waves. Red light has
a longer wavelength than violet light. The refractive index for red light in glass is slightly
different than for violet light. Violet light slows down even more than red light, so it is
refracted at a slightly greater angle.
The refractive index of red light in glass is 1.513. The refractive index of violet light is 1.532.
This slight difference is enough for the shorter wavelengths of light to be refracted more.

Rainbows

Image: Rainbow

A rainbow is caused because each colour refracts at slightly different angles as it enters,
reflects off the inside and then leaves each tiny drop of rain.

A rainbow is easy to create using a spray bottle and the sunshine. The centre of the circle of
the rainbow will always be the shadow of your head on the ground.

The secondary rainbow that can sometimes be seen is caused by each ray of light reflecting
twice on the inside of each droplet before it leaves. This second reflection causes the colours
on the secondary rainbow to be reversed. Red is at the top for the primary rainbow, but in the
secondary rainbow, red is at the bottom.

n optics, dispersion is the phenomenon in which the phase velocity of a wave depends on its
frequency.[1] Media having this common property may be termed dispersive media.
Sometimes the term chromatic dispersion is used for specificity. Although the term is used
in the field of optics to describe light and other electromagnetic waves, dispersion in the same
sense can apply to any sort of wave motion such as acoustic dispersion in the case of sound
and seismic waves, in gravity waves (ocean waves), and for telecommunication signals
propagating along transmission lines (such as coaxial cable) or optical fiber.

In optics, one important and familiar consequence of dispersion is the change in the angle of
refraction of different colors of light,[2] as seen in the spectrum produced by a dispersive
prism and in chromatic aberration of lenses. Design of compound achromatic lenses, in which
chromatic aberration is largely cancelled, uses a quantification of a glass's dispersion given
by its Abbe number V, where lower Abbe numbers correspond to greater dispersion over the
visible spectrum. In some applications such as telecommunications, the absolute phase of a
wave is often not important but only the propagation of wave packets or "pulses"; in that case
one is interested only in variations of group velocity with frequency, so-called group-velocity
dispersion (GVD).