What causes sunset colors?
Sunlight is composed of a spectrum of colors that ranges from violet and blue at one end to orange and red on the other. At sunrise or sunset, sunlight takes a much longer path through the atmosphere than during the middle part of the day. More violet and blue light is scattered out of the beam along the way, and so the light which reaches the human eye early or late in the day is reddened. The best sunsets occur when there are at least a few high clouds. The sun’s rays hit higher clouds before they pass through the lower atmosphere, where the air has more particles. So the bright reds and oranges are filtered through at the high cloud’s level.
