Young Brunette Girl On The Sand At Sunset

Colors
Incident solar white light traveling through the earth's atmosphere is attenuated by scattering and absorption by the air molecules and airborne particles by a combination of Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering. At sunset and sunrise, sunlight's path through the atmosphere is much longer than during the daytime, which creates different colors. At sunrise and sunset there is more attenuation and light scattering by air molecules that remove violets, blues and greens, relatively enhancing reds and oranges. Because the shorter wavelength light of violets, blues and greens scatter more strongly by Rayleigh Scattering, violets, blues and greens are removed almost completely from the incident beam, leaving mostly only longer wavelength orange and red hues at sunrise and sunset, which are further scattered by Mie scattering across the horizon to produce intense reds and oranges, when there are soot, dust, or solid or liquid aerosols in the atmosphere. The removal of the shorter wavelengths of light is due to Rayleigh scattering by air molecules and small particles of sizes an order of magnitude smaller that the wavelength of visible light (typically particles and molecules smaller than 50 nm). The sun is actually white when observed without any air between the viewer and the sun, so, sunlight in outer space contains a mixture of violets, blues, greens, yellows, oranges and reds. Due to Rayleigh scattering, the sun appears reddish or yellowish when we look at it from earth, since the longer wavelengths of reds and yellow light are scattered the least, passing through the air to the viewer, while shorter wavelengths like violet, blue, and green light are effectively removed from direct sunlight by air molecules' Rayleigh scattering.
Rayleigh scattering is the elastic scattering of electromagnetic radiation due to the polarizability of the electron cloud in molecules and particles much smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Rayleigh scattering intensity is fairly omnidirectional and has a strong reciprocal 4th-power wavelength dependency and, thus, the shorter wavelengths of violet and blue light are effected much more than the longer wavelengths of yellow to red light. During the day, this scattering results in the increasingly intense blue color of the sky away from the direct line of sight to the Sun, while during sunrise and sunset, the much longer path length through the atmosphere results in the complete removal of violet, blue and green light from the incident rays, leaving weak intensities of orange to red light.