Why do we see the sky as blue and not violet?

The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. Rayleigh scattering is the elastic scattering of light by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air. However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue. As for Switch, you are SILLY! The water is NOT blue! :-P Silly violin boy! Seriously, if you take a cup of ocean water, is it blue? No, it's clear. The ocean water appears to be blue because it absorbs the red side of the color spectrum and reflects the blue side. That's why we see it as blue (other than the red sea, which appears red because of the red algae living in it, and the black sea, which appears black from the high concentration of hydrogen sulfide. The red side of the spectrum gets quickly absorbed into the water. The blue side, however, passes through the water to greater depths (almost 200 meters). Any deeper than 200 meters and no light passes through. Ergo, the majority of the ocean is actually dark. LC-B

Yo. Love the question! If my years of Science have taught me anything, its that its because the human eyes detects blue more strongly than violet. The sky is actually quiet violet, but the blue dominates what we see, as it is stronger. HIH! PS: Love the new avatar. Your hair is pretty!

The sky is blue because water is blue. water droplets are almost always in the sky - these droplets get refracted through turning the sky blue. I am not sure what this question has to do with short wavelengths. why would we have trouble seeing violet? I have seen a pretty violet sunset.....and I have no problem seeing violin in the spectrum on the back of a CD or prism or anything.... ---- Lauren. :-( - whether I am wrong or not about the sky. water is still blue. we can say your hair was once red because it reflected red light - but technically it was red. so technically water is blue. :D --- oh dear: how sad am I http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/BlueSky/blue_sky.html

Dear MissLimLam, Nice question! Well, since purple/violet is my favorite color, I would surely have seen a purple sky by now. One exception: in December 1976 I was at the Grand Canyon in Arizona at sunset ----the colors changed almost every second. It was there that I observed my first purple colors in the sky/canyon. Lovely experience. As far as the science aspect, looks like you have many that responded to that part of your question. All the best, Julian of N

The sky has violet in it, since we can't see the wavelengths themselves but a combination of wavelengths that the cones in our retina can only perceive as blue.

why should it be violet rather than blue ?!?!

The violet rays are absorbed by the atmosphere. Also, our eyes are not as sensitive to violet as they are to blue. (The blue and violet waves are the ones we should be able to see).

My answer to ur question ~Got it from my Science Book ~The hues that we see in the sky are not only determined by the laws of physics, but are also colored by the human visual system, shows a new paper in the American Journal of Physics. On a clear day when the sun is well above the horizon, the analysis demonstrates, we perceive the complex spectrum of colors in the sky as a mixture of white light and pure blue. When sunlight enters the earth's atmosphere, it scatters (ricochets) mainly from oxygen and nitrogen molecules that make up most of our air. What scatters the most is the light with the shortest wavelengths, towards the blue end of the spectrum, so more of that light will reach our eyes than other colors. In the early 19th century, physicist John William Strutt, better known by his title, Lord Rayleigh, wrote equations to show how light scatters in the sky. And in recent years Raymond Lee of the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD, measured light coming from a noonday sky. Both equations and measurements showed that peak amounts of violet light reach our eyes too. So what is happening? Combining physics with quantitative data on the responsiveness of the human visual system, Glenn Smith of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, points to the way in which our eye's three different types of cones detect color. Cones are cells in the eye that detect color. They lie along the back of the eye, the retina, amidst light and motion sensing cells called rods. The eyes have three kinds of cones, each tuned to different ranges of color. When a wave of light strikes the eye, the cones send a signal to the brain. If a blue wave, with short undulations, enters the cone, the cone sends a signal to see blue. If a red wave, with long humps, hits the cones, the brain sees "red." But if a red wave and a green wave enter at the same time, the eye's various cones send a signal that the brain interprets as the in-between color of yellow. As Smith shows, the sky's complex multichromatic rainbow of colors tickles our eye's cones in the same way as a specific mixture of pure blue and white light. The cones that allow us to see color cannot identify the actual wavelengths that hit them, but if they are stimulated by the right combination of wavelengths, then it will appear the same to our eyes as a single pure color, or a mixture of a pure color and white light. And that is why the sky is blue – or seems so.

I was told because the sunlight reflects the water.