In pictures taken from the summit of Mount Everest (such as this one), the colour of the sky is a very dark blue or even black in some pictures. I remember from my own experiences of hiking in the Himalayas that the sky appeared to be darker blue as I climbed higher. The net effect is that the red and green cones are stimulated about equally by the light from the sky, while the blue is stimulated more strongly. This combination accounts for the pale sky blue colour. It may not be a coincidence that our vision is adjusted to see the sky as a pure hue. The sky does not skip over the green range of frequencies. The sky is green. Remove the scattered light from the Sun and the Moon and even the starlight, if you so wish, and you'll be left with something called airglow (check out the link, it's awesome, great pics, and nice explanation). Why does the sky change color? Why is the sky blue during the day, red during sunrise/set and black during the night? (5 answers) Closed 11 years ago. My nephew asked me yesterday why the sky was blue. I tried to explain it to him as best and as dumbly I could, but I failed. Sunlight is white. Blue sky is due to Rayleigh scattering, where the intensity of scattered light depends on the fourth power of the frequency, then this is why the sky is blue, since blue is in the upper bound of the visible spectrum in frequency. This is because the molecules in atmosphere have a size much smaller than the wavelength of light. So, the sky which scatters blue wavelengths appears blue and red/yellow wavelengths of sun survive to reach our eyes to give it its color. Mie scattering: For larger sized particles, all wavelengths are scattered identically. It is caused by larger particles like water droplets in clouds. That's why they appear white or grey. The sunlight which does arrive from all directions, the blue sky from Rayleigh scattering, is polarized. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh_sky_model. As E=hf=hcλ, blue light - with a smaller wavelength - should have a higher energy. However, it is the case that blue light scatters the As you've said in your question, blue light has a smaller wavelength than red light. Assuming you are talking about the sky, the scattering is from particles much smaller than the wavelength of light. Coming to other stars. Most stars in the night sky appear to be white when they really are not. Many of them are red, blue, green, orange etc. But because they are light years away from us, our eye is hardly ever able to distinguish the color and we see it as either white or slightly blue. The main reason why the sun doesn't look white is due to Rayeleigh Scattering means that the blue light from the sun is scattered so it appears to be yellow or even orange when viewed through thicker atmosphere. This means that when you take a photograph of the sun (through the necessary filters) from the surface of the earth it will appear yellow or even orange.