• merc@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    The reason the sun appears to be yellow is the same reason that the sky appears to be blue.

    Blue light is scattered more by the air in the atmosphere than other wavelengths. Remove blue from white light and you get yellow. So the light coming from the sun that isn’t scattered and dispersed through the sky (making the sky look blue) is yellow.

    • Lemmywinks@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      It’s the opposite, no? Red and green light have shorter wavelengths, so they get scattered before they reach our eyes, but the blue wavelengths are long enough that we actually see them

      • merc@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        No, it’s well known Raleigh scattering. Red and green have longer wavelengths than blue. Just past red, in the “wavelengths too long to be seen” direction is infrared which we feel as heat, and which just makes things warm. If you go the other direction into “wavelengths too short to be seen” direction, past violet, you get into Ultra Violet or UV, which is ionizing radiation, and that’s why UV is a skin cancer danger. The short wavelength blue light gets scattered, the longer wavelengths don’t, so the sky appears blue, and the sun appears yellow.