Why is the sky blue and not purple?

[cragar]

how is the sky blue and not purple? how come purple light is not scattered , or how come the sky does not appear purple to us .

 

[D H]

Your eyes don't work as well on violet as they do on blue.

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=688
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8631798/

 

[cragar]

so violet light is scattered our eyes just don't pick it up.

 

[uart]

so violet light is scattered our eyes just don't pick it up.

The whole range of visible frequencies are scattered, from red through to violet. However with more scattering happening at the blue-violet end and less at the red-orange end our eyes perceive this mixture of colors as blue.

 

[cragar]

i see

 

[protonchain]

In fact birds see the sky in ultraviolet because their eyes have evolved that way.

Food for thought.

 

[Bob S]

The "blue" in blue sky is attributed to Rayleigh scattering of sunlight. The frequency (wavelength) dependence is f⁴ (lambda^-4). Purple is an admixture of red and blue. There is very little "red" in "blue" sky. Have you noticed that at 90 degrees to the sun, the blue sky light is nearly completely polarized (only when the air is cloudless and really pollution free). Why polarized?

 

[tiny-tim]

purple stripes

how is the sky blue and not purple? how come purple light is not scattered , or how come the sky does not appear purple to us .

Hi cragar!

Only the stripes are purple …

… I Was Walking Along, Minding My Business,
When Love Came And Hit Me In The Eye
Flash! Bam! Alakazam!
Out Of An Orange-Colored, Purple-Striped, Pretty Green Polka-Dot Sky
Flash! Bam! Alakazam! And Goodbye!

 

[granpa]

blue is short wavelength light. red is long wavelength light. short wavelength light is scattered more.

purple isn't in the rainbow

 

[uart]

I'm pretty sure that cragar actually meant violet even though he said purple, that was my interpretation of the question anyway. My understanding of what cragar was asking is basically : given that shorter wavelengths are the most readily scattered - and violet is the shortest wavelength we can see - then why don't we see the sky as violet.

Actually it's interesting that although technically violet (the spectral color at around 380-420nm) and purple (typically a mixture of blue and red) are very different, in terms of human perception they are indeed very similar. Violet is necesarily represented as a shade of purple in RBG color-space on a computer monitor and it isn't all that bad an approximation of what the spectral color actually looks like (in terms of human perception). So in my opinion cragars use of the term purple, in the context of "how should the sky appear to us", really wasn't at all inappropriate (even if he was really referring to violet).

 

[D H]

purple isn't in the rainbow

Didn't you ever learn the mnemonic Roy G. Biv? The colors of the rainbow are Red, orange, yellow, Green, Blue, indigo, and violet. Isaac Newton thought the spectrum should have seven items to match the number of days in the year.

Some rainbows:

I'm pretty sure that cragar actually meant violet even though he said purple, that was my interpretation of the question anyway. My understanding of what cragar was asking is basically : given that shorter wavelengths are the most readily scattered - and violet is the shortest wavelength we can see - then why don't we see the sky as violet.

That's exactly how I interpreted his question. The question to be answered isn't "why is the sky blue?" cragar apparently knows the stock answer to this question as talks about scattering in the original post. He is questioning this stock answer, and this stock answer is only partially correct.

The question to be answered is "If scattering is the sole answer to 'why is the sky blue', why isn't the sky indigo, or even violet? After all, indigo and violet should be scattered even more than is blue." The answer to this deeper question lies not only in the sky but also in our eyes and in the way in which we perceive color.

When there is a lot of scattering the sky can appear to be indigo, or even violet.

 

[cepheid]

Why is violet followed by even more green in both of the pictures of rainbows that D H posted?

 

[D H]

I posted three pictures of rainbows, not two. The first two are of supernumerary rainbows. For more, google that phrase, or see
http://www.atoptics.co.uk/rainbows/supers.htm
http://www.jal.cc.il.us/~mikolajsawicki/rainbows.htm