Equality 7-2521 wrote:
Just to be a little technical Dean the sun is slightly yellowish (slightly very key). This and the composition of our atmosphere (and probably our eyes a little bit too but I know much less about the human side) account for a deep blue rather than a violet from the scattering. The white hazy appearance of the sky directly above us is, in addition to what you have been saying, dependent on another type of scattering which is less predominate called Mie Scattering.
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Coming back to the optical science of vision for a moment - the colour response of the human eye changes with light intensity (I touched on this earlier - in very low light levels we discard colour information from the cone receptors completely and rely on the rod receptors alone). Under normal light levels we peak in the yellow/green region (M & L cones in the following graph) so are more sensitive to yellows and greens.
which when combined, looks like this, peaking at around 555nm:
As the light levels drop, we become more sensitive to the shorter wavelengths around 507nm.
This goes some way to explaining why tungsten indoor lighting doesn't look so orange to us compared to what a camera would see, but as I said, the processing of that information has a lot to do with it as well.