WASHINGTON — From crimson leaves to golden fields and coppery hills, Mother Nature is known to put on a show during the fall months . If you look up and notice a bluer-than-average sky, your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. It’s simply science.

Blue skies aren’t really blue at all. The atmosphere is colorless. Sunlight, or visible light, is made up of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. As it reaches Earth, it interacts with tiny molecules of gases like nitrogen and oxygen and gets scattered in all directions. This is called Rayleigh scattering.

“Blue light scatters more than other colors in the spectrum because it travels in shorter, smaller waves compared to other visible light, like red or orange, which have longer wavelengths,” said WQAD senior meteorologist Andrew Stut

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