Question: How and Why is the sky blue ?

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  1. Hi leelee1997,

    It isn’t. It just LOOKS blue. ;-p And that’s only during the day.

    It is the sun that makes the sky look blue during the day. This happens because blue light gets “scattered” by the air (the light changes the direction it is travelling in, so that you see light coming from parts of the sky even though the sun isn’t there) much more than red light.

    See this website for a more detailed explanation and some diagrams:
    http://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/General/BlueSky/blue_sky.html

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  2. Hi leelee1997

    That is also the reason why sunsets look red. It has to do with what wavelengths of light are scattered towards us at earth and depending on what is in the atmosphere.

    So during the day, when the sun is high in the sky the blue light gets scattered towards us. But in the afternoon, the sun is low in the sky and the aerosols in the atmosphere are more likely to scatter red light towards us.

    Hope that helps. 🙂

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