When you look at a sunset, you see a variety of different colors. You see red, orange, yellow, pink and more. But did you know that vibrant colors from a sunset are due to a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering, where shorter blue and violet wavelengths are scattered out by the atmosphere, leaving longer red and orange wavelengths for us to see? When people look at sunsets, they feel peace, comfort and even relaxation.
Scarlett Kulakowski, a sophomore at Kaneland High School, oftentimes links her own emotions to sunsets when she has a chance to reflect on their impact.
“It was a really nice night out. Not too warm, not too cold. I was sitting outside on my tire swing, listening to music, enjoying the view. There was a really beautiful sunset. It had many different colors. Pink, orange, a little bit of blue. I was just staring at it. When I was staring at it, I just felt so comfortable and felt like so much weight was lifted off my shoulders. I just continued to watch the sunset slowly go away,” Kulakowski said.
Humans can find sunsets very appealing due to the feelings of comfort and happiness that people associate with them. Part of the reason is because of the overall natural beauty they have with all of the different colors. The sky reveals vibrant colors, and the sky changes throughout the day. This helps people reduce their anxiety and have an increased feeling of relaxation.
Dr. Andres Chou, a psychologist who lives in Orange City, CA, has an interest in helping people with their struggles with mental health. He connects his emotions with sunsets and how he felt when he was in the mountains watching a sunset.
“I recently spent some time in the mountains. One late afternoon, I sat near a lake and watched a beautiful sunset behind the mountains. I felt so rejuvenated that it made me curious about what could have been happening during that sunset that helped me feel so refreshed,” Chou wrote in an article called How Sunsets Might Improve Your Mental Health.
Sunsets can be emotional for people because when they are looking at one, it can remind them of someone. It might be they lost, or even someone they love. Looking at a sunset, knowing there is someone up there you cared about and loved deeply, could make you think that it is an end of someone’s life and a start of a new journey for them. It can also make an individual feel happiness from being reminded of people they care about.
People mainly find sunsets interesting due to all their different colors. But most people don’t know why they can be all these different colors. Steven Ackerman, a meteorologist at UW-Madison, says that molecules and small particles in the atmosphere change the directions of light in the sky, which is what causes them to scatter. The colors blue and violet get scattered way more from the molecules in the air than other colors. This is why it is easier for us to see the blueness of the sky during the day. Then, there are other colors you would normally see during a sunset, like orange, yellow and red, that you can’t see during the day until sunset because they slowly appear in your eyes.
Elena Paton, a junior at Kaneland, finds interest in sitting outside to watch the sunset form to get a bigger picture on how it all works.
“When I sit outside before the sunset is about to happen, I always wonder how it starts to develop. One day, I did some research on it. I read that when the sunset starts to set, the light from the sun passes through more of the Earth’s atmosphere than when it is high up in the sky. So when the sun is lower, it moves a longer distance through the atmosphere,” Paton said.
This can help us understand more about the natural phenomenon of a sunset. This helps us be reminded every day of the beautiful process that happens even if we don’t consider it. It identifies the interconnectedness of nature and how something so simple, like the scattering of different colors, creates such a beautiful thing. It helps us consider more about the world we live in, even though it is something we see every day and might not think much about.
