Why doesn't the air we walk around in have color like the sky?
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answers:
Enough Trolls say: The air does have colour just like the sky because the air is the sky. Rayleigh scattering diminishes the red component and so the air glows blue. But it is so subtle that you can only see it over several miles.
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YKhan say: The Sun is white when you look at it from up in space outside the atmosphere. Inside the atmosphere, Rayleigh Scattering takes the blue out of that white, and scatters it all throughout the atmosphere. That makes the Sun look yellow, because everything below the blue frequencies is left unscattered. The blue doesn't get absorbed, it just gets scattered. So when all of the light hits the ground, it's all white again, because all of the unscattered and scattered light come back together to form white again.
That's also the reason why we don't see hard shadows in sunlight. Even though (most of) the Sun's light is coming from one direction (wherever the Sun is overhead). There is the blue component of the sunlight that is coming from all kinds of scattered locations, which softens the shadows, since they aren't coming only from the Sun's direction.
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Adullah M say: It actually is white light, that is the mixture of all the colors of spectrum which being spin together in high speed . So the result is white.
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Ronald 7 say: It is Rayleigh Scattering that turns our sky blue, miles above
Down here there is not as much refraction close up
it is the same effect as Mirages at a distance
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Tom S say: The blue color (due to Rayleigh scattering of sunlight) is very subtle, you need to be looking through many miles of it to notice. Just like a glass of water look clear versus a sea of water which looks blue.
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Angel Mendez say: cuz its the ground
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say: it is colored oxygen is pale blue which you can only see when it is liquid
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Pearl say: cause god didnt nnake it that way, nnaybe you can suggest that to hinn
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Clive say: Because the sky isn't coloured either. All you're seeing is scattered sunlight. At night, with no sunlight around, it's black, isn't it? Which means the absence of anything to cause colour.
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L. E. Gant say: It does....
However, the blue in the sky is more because of refraction of light, rather than intrinsic to the air.
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WHANKING-WILLY say: All of the above. However, Oxygen is a pale blue gas.
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CarolOklaNola say: Because air is transparent. It has NO color UNLESS there is stuff IN the air like dust, sand, soot or air pollution line sulfuric , nitric and acetic acid. The Clean Air Act in the United States WORKED. That was a GOOD thing from the Nixon administration
I used to to SEE the layer of air pollution at sunset in the early and middle 1980s during Reagan's administration.
Even at night the sky is usually a very dark navy blue because of scattered light, rarely totally black.
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Jon say: There is, in fact, blue light being scattered from the air you're walking around in, but it's too faint to obscure the view of nearby objects.
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