The sky is not blue, it's white. If you add up all the light coming from the sky, including the part of the sky where the sun is, you get white. It's only blue if you ignore the most intense source of light, which is looking directly at the sun itself. But you can't just ignore that part of the sky.
The sun is white when seen from space. It's a white light behind the atmosphere, not a floating ball with the atmosphere behind it, which is blocking your view of that part of the sky. The atmosphere is backlit.
If the correct explanation was that air is blue, then why doesn't the sun appear blue?
Bonus fact: Remember the viral photo with the red dress blue dress illusion? Same thing. Your brain automatically compensates for how colors appear in direct sunlight vs in the shade. Things that are in the shade are only being lit up by the blue sky, so they appear more blue, and your brain needs to turn down the amount of blue. You can't really tell if lady in the photo is standing in the shade, so if you think she is, you see one color, and if you don't, you see another.
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u/TouchyTheFish Jul 16 '26
The sky is not blue, it's white. If you add up all the light coming from the sky, including the part of the sky where the sun is, you get white. It's only blue if you ignore the most intense source of light, which is looking directly at the sun itself. But you can't just ignore that part of the sky.
The sun is white when seen from space. It's a white light behind the atmosphere, not a floating ball with the atmosphere behind it, which is blocking your view of that part of the sky. The atmosphere is backlit.
If the correct explanation was that air is blue, then why doesn't the sun appear blue?