Crap, I thought it was because God already used the green crayon for the grass and the blue crayon for the sky and wanted to save the red and purple crayons for flowers.
That’s Ohio, though- the rivers there would scare the East River.
Alex; “what does the sun taste like?”
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace.
Well, my crayon box didn’t have clear as an option.
Anyway the ocean often does look bluish due to the reflection of the sky.
Furthermore, water is blue.
From wikipedia:
The color of water is a subject of both scientific study and popular misconception. While relatively small quantities of water are observed by humans to be colorless, pure water has a slight blue tint that becomes a deeper blue as the thickness of the observed sample increases. The blue hue of water is an intrinsic property and is caused by selective absorption and scattering of white light. Impurities dissolved or suspended in water may give water different colored appearances.
It is a common misconception that in large bodies, such as the oceans, the water’s color is blue due to the reflections from the sky on its surface.
The opportunity to visibly observe the blue color of water from land or airplanes is provided by the optical scattering of unabsorbed light from water molecules, from white sandy ocean bottoms, as well as from suspended particles in the water. The back-scattering from water molecules alone is very small and only observable in highly purified water.
You might just want to check that “fact” before you go around repeating it.
Cultural indoctrination. Where I live (Japan) children draw red suns, even if it’s shown as being high in the sky.
The lakes and rivers in Arkansas are generally blue. Last time I was on the east coast and looked into the Atlantic Ocean it looked blue to me. It looked blue in New Jersey and it looked blue in Virginia.
I wouldn’t say it’s rare to see blue water. If you live anywhere near the ocean, a large river or body of water larger than a pond, or if you visit a swimming pool(often tiled or coated blue inside, but the water itself is also still blue), or a public aquarium, you see blue water.
If you have a white bath and fill it with plain water, you can see the blue colour.
The water the Tidy Bowl man sails on is blue!
Au contraire - the sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma.
The sun looks yellow compared with the blue sky. Yellow is the complementary colour of blue. And, as others have pointed out, the blue colour of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering, and all that light has come from the sun. So if the blue light is smeared out across the whole sky, there must be more yellow left in the image of the sun itself.
A dropped barbell.
Huh, go figure. I’ll add that one to the list of yet another thing I learned in school that was completely wrong.
It’s caught fire a couple times, back in the day. I saw pictures.
Film at eleven;
Cool, in a way. Finally got some attention about pollution.
Regarding water color I had an interesting experience once. Got there and the water was a vibrant GREEN. It was impressive and beautiful. Then I noticed two things. The water is only inches deep and crystal clear. For a few moments I was like WTF? Then I put two and two together. Crystal clear water. Sandy white bottom. Whole area covered by vibrant green foliage up high. Ahhhh… makes sense now.
I call BS. Unless you did the experiment when the sun was low in the sky, sunlight is the very definition of “white” – The CIE Chromaticity coordinates of sunlight – B, C, and D – are meant to represent sunlight. None of them is yellow:
The amount of blue scattered out of sunlight when it’s high in the sky isn’t enough to mmake it look yellow. I’d be curious to see your “histogram” data that suggests otherwise.
It is true that as the sun descends it traverses more atmosphere, and as it gets lower (and less irritating to the eye) it will appear more yellow as it gets closer to the horizon. The setting sun , depending upon how much dust and the like is in the air, will appear yellow, orange, or red. I suspect that people universally say the sun is yellow because, if you plot out the CIE coordinates of the sun, it progresses from white directly toward the yellow point on the spectral locus (I’ve done the calculation) before veering off to orange or red.
As Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer (and a onetime Doper) pointed out, if sunlight were yellow because of the blue light scattered out, then anything white would appear yellow – white houses, whie signs, white cumulus clouds. Despite Billfish’s assrtions, they certainly don’t appear that way to me – or to the people who designated the standard illuminants.
Not when you ADD back in the blue that got scattered out in the first place. Do the damn experiment. Look a piece of paper illuminated only by direct sunlight only. Then look at one illuminated by direct sunlight PLUS about 1 pi steradians of clear blue sky. One HAS to look more blueish or yellowish than the other one. Which you pick to call what is abitrary. But IMO yours is more arbitrary than mine, because it depends on a many variable to all be specific condition.
Do puffy white clouds in the sky to you look white or do they look blue?
