What causes a sunset to be so beautiful?
Carolyn…I am drawing this one in the morning…. Warning!! Use caution with concentrated acid. Sulfuric acid is extremely caustic and dangerous! Always place acid into water to prevent the splashing of the acid. Just as white light is scattered into the colors of a rainbow when it passes through a prism, each particle in the atmosphere acts like a prism scattering the white light into red at one end of the spectrum and blue at the other. Blue light has the shortest wavelength and refracts with the largest angle. When the Sun sets in the west, you are looking through a much thicker layer of the atmosphere filled with dust and moisture compared to the size of the layer at noon time. It is easy to simulate a sunset in a bottle. The reaction of sulfuric acid with sodium thiosulfate slowly precipitates sulfur out of the solution. These increasingly larger sulfur suspensions simulate the larger concentration of the dust and water in the atmosphere at sunset. To set the mood, you may want t
