A Carnivorous Flower

“The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”

Roberto Bolaño, 2666

Most all of us have seen a few wonderful sunsets each summer (e.g. at Lake Balaton ^^ ). In fact, most of us have also probably read about why the sky is blue - we have so much in common!

Quick summary on the sky's color: Light coming from the sun scatters off the molecules and atoms in the air in a way that lower frequencies of light (like red, orange, yellow) scatter less and higher frequencies of light (like blue, violet) scatter much more.

When the sun goes down, it seems to paint the bottom part of the sky red and orange. How?

No one knows...

Just joking - hehehe. We do know - it's the same effect that makes the sky blue!

When the sun goes down, the light coming from it has to travel through much more air.

So when the sun is low, we have lots of light coming through the "long path" (see illustration). Because it's going through a long path, the effect of bluish light scattering away and reddish light remaining is stronger... simply because it happens through a longer path!

Cool right?

So the bottom of the sky is beautiful red and we have a nice gradient all the way to blue.

This brings us to an artistic question to think about:

-If the atmosphere were thicker, would the sky be red?