3 ms·
So to bring this a little bit back to biology (and away from the fact that the article says little about humans) I would conjecture that the issue with blue lig
by mikorym 7y ago
So to bring this a little bit back to biology (and away from the fact that the article says little about humans) I would conjecture that the issue with blue light may stem from Rayleigh scattering [1] of sunlight and the subsequent phenomenon whereby the light that reaches us has a lot of the blue component removed.
In the late afternoon, all the blue light get caught and even some of the red, since the sun is now not just an atmosphere-length but an atmosphere length plus a radius of the earth length from the observer and hence has more distance to get scattered. This would mean we get orange-ish light.
Have biologists pointed this out?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_scattering
- baxtr 7y agoI always wondered: is there anyway to distinguish an evening from a morning through the sort of light we see. So Image you see random pictures and don’t know if it’s dawn or dusk. Can you see the difference?
- mikorym 7y agoBased on Raleigh scattering only and one time stamp only the answer is, I think... Maybe. In the morning, if there is less dust, then there would be different Raleigh scattering.
- goblin89 7y agoInterestingly enough, if you aren’t familiar with the location, there’s no foolproof method to tell whether it’s morning or evening by light alone. There may be cues, like if it’s a city then the properties of light could reflect the denser pollution it has to penetrate in the evening, but that still depends on location and time of year. I sincerely thought I could tell mornings from evenings by light alone, until I congratulated a friend on a great capture of evening light and he told me the shot was taken in the morning. Did some research after that.