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justin_dashyesterday at 5:08 PM5 repliesview on HN

For the sunset example then, a natural question (for me) is then why isn't the sky green in the transition from blue sky to red sunset sky?


Replies

photonic37yesterday at 5:27 PM

Your intuition isn’t far off; there is an angle where the weight of green relative to the sum over wavelengths sees a local maximum. But it doesn’t dominate. In that transition zone, there is still an overlapping, transitioning abundance of redder and bluer wavelengths, adding with the green. Consequently, you see red, going into a red+green transition (== oranges, yellows), go into into a green+blue transition (== cyan), which already has few photons relative to the red and yellow zones, so it’s a dark/weak cyan, before it blends into the darker blue of the night sky.

teraflopyesterday at 5:24 PM

Because the color of the sky is determined by a shifting mixture of wavelengths, not a single shifting wavelength.

Basically, the scattering process that "remove" blue from the spectrum also removes green, albeit to a lesser extent. There are some greenish and yellowish wavelengths in the sunset sky, but they're dominated by red, so the overall color appears red or orange.

In order for the sky to look noticeably green, there would have to be something that scattered reds and blues, without significantly absorbing green.

If you try to interpolate between sky-blue and orange using graphics software, the result depends on what "color space" you're using. If your software interpolates based on hue, you might see green (or purple) in the middle. But that's not physically realistic.

A realistic model is to interpolate each wavelength of the continuous spectrum separately. Interpolating in RGB color space is a crude approximation to this. And if you try the experiment, you'll see that the midpoint between sky-blue and orange is a kind of muddy brown, not green.

adornKeyyesterday at 5:39 PM

You won't get a green sky, but at least there is a meteorological optical phenomenon called the green flash around sunset. To see it, I think, you have to know what you're looking for - and you need good conditions.

michael1999yesterday at 5:52 PM

It can be - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_flash

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seanalltogetheryesterday at 9:07 PM

Blue + Green + Red = White

Green + Red = Yellow

Red = Red

That is the natural transition from overhead sun to sunset as each higher energy wavelength gets cut off more and more. When blue is mostly gone and green starts to fade we call it the Golden Hour.