Question

Before sunset, why does a person experience seeing different colors in the sky starting from colours like orange, pink and finally purple which further becomes black?

Answer 1

There are two reasons for this.

First, let’s talk about Rayleigh scattering. You probably know that sunlight is made of many, many different colors (wavelengths) of visible light. When sunlight passes through the air, some colors interact with air molecules more strongly than others. Red, orange, yellow, and green light pass through air without much interference, but blue and violet light interact strongly with air molecules. Blue and violet light are absorbed by air molecules, then re-emitted in all directions. This gives the daytime sky its characteristic blue color.

At sunrise and sunset, the Sun’s light must pass through more air before it reaches your eyes. As a result of the longer pathway, even more of the Sun’s colors are absorbed or scattered by the intervening air. Only the red/orange portion of the visible spectrum makes it through, which contributes to the color of the sky at sunrise or sunset.

But that’s not the only factor; if it were, some sunsets wouldn’t appear redder than others.

The color of a sunrise or sunset is also due to weather conditions and the amount of dust in the atmosphere. Dust, like air molecules, tends to scatter light, although the mechanism is a bit different. At any rate, if there are a lot of particles in the air, sunrises and sunsets can look spectacularly red/orange.

Answer 2

as we all know that white colour a mixture of different colours of different wavelength. at the time of sunset particles of atmosphere split white light into different colours having different wavelength therefore we are able to see different colours according to their wavelength ..


hope it will help you ..