An Update to the Celestial Sphere Page!
The World of Light and Color
A Learning Experience Made Easy for Everyone!
As always, I like to think that any person can learn about science and the world around us, and the internet is a great tool for finding creative and easy to understand methods. The Physics Classroom, a website dedicated to giving handy lessons for learning about, well physics! Their lesson goes over how light refracts and diffracts (basically how it moves) in the same way as waves- evidence to support that light moves not only in waves, but particles as well. This may seem easy for us to understand now, but several hundred years ago, someone would have called you crazy for having the same notion!
What I find most interesting about light behavior is how it behaves when it comes against something, or another medium. Not only do we have to realize what reaction light will have, but this is also dependent on what type of light it is. For example, ultraviolet light will tan your skin (or give you cancer if you don't take it easy), but gamma rays would literally kill you if you absorbed too much.
This is the link to the lesson plan on waves, the color spectrum, and the behaviors of light. What I want to go over is the section entitled Blue Skies and Red Sunsets (as it caught my eye). This lesson focuses on the colors we see based on the visible light of an object. That is not to say for example, that a leaf is actually green- rather the chemicals in the leaf (chlorophyll) absorb all other colors therefore our eyes interpret the leaf as green. In the same regard, during the fall and winter when there is less sunlight, therefore less chlorophyll, our eyes interpret the leaves as orange, yellow, and red. Personally, I think this is awesome! Another great example they had was the asphalt on the street; we see it as black because it absorbs all other light frequencies.
They go on to explain that we see sunsets as red due to light scattering as the sun travels over our horizon in the atmosphere, the longer distance causes it to fall into the yellow, orange, and red ends of the light spectrum. The light from a sunset has a longer wavelength than that of daytime sun, which is why the sky appears blue during the day. Shorter wavelengths of light have a higher frequency, which is explained to fall on the blue and violet ends of our color spectrum. A modern phenomena they point out is that due to our atmospheric pollution, there is more sulfur in the air, which is the reason behind some of the amazing multi-hued sunsets we see. As beautiful as they are, they are actually a sign that there is real damage to our Earth.
The following is a link to the lesson and its diagrams:
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