alt Hacker NewsI don't think that's right. Sunlight is white in the atmosphere too. Scattering causes the sun, not the light, to look yellow, and so sunlight is thought of as yellow.
I don't think that's right. Sunlight is white in the atmosphere too. Scattering causes the sun, not the light, to look yellow, and so sunlight is thought of as yellow.
Scattering doesn’t really make the sun to appear yellow except when it’s low, behind a lot of air. When it’s above 30° or so it just looks blinding, neutral white (or non-blinding neutral white if there’s suitable cloud cover or other filter in front of it). Even though a lot of the blues are scattered around, the sun still looks just white when it’s high in the sky.
But when the sun does look yellow, its light is yellow too, that’s the definition of "looks yellow". And the golden hour paints everything in very iconic yellow-orange hues. The light as integrated over the whole sky is still white (modulo whatever’s scattered back into space), but the light that comes from the direction of the sun is clearly tinted yellow and the light from the rest of the sky is clearly tinted blue.