Why does the sky look blue?
Sunlight is a mix of colors, and air molecules scatter short blue wavelengths far more than red ones, so scattered blue light reaches your eyes from all over the sky.
Transcript
Sunlight looks white. So why is the sky blue?
Sunlight is a mix of every color. Each color travels as a wave, and the waves have different lengths.
Air is mostly tiny nitrogen and oxygen molecules. Sunlight bumps into them and gets scattered in every direction.
Short blue waves scatter much more than long red waves. So blue light bounces all across the sky.
When you look up, scattered blue light reaches your eyes from every direction. That is the blue you see.
Violet scatters even more, but the sun gives off less of it, and our eyes see it poorly.
The sky looks blue because air scatters blue light all across the sky.
Source notes
- NASA Space Place, “Why Is the Sky Blue?” — Supplied with the topic. States that gases and particles in the air scatter sunlight in all directions, and blue more than other colors because of its shorter waves.
How this example was made
Made with the prototype on 7 October 2026. The topic and references were typed in, a 45-second length and the kinetic type style were chosen, and the script and storyboard were written by Claude through the team’s subscription. We checked the script against the source. It describes Rayleigh scattering without naming it. The violet point is simplified: sunlight carries less violet and our eyes are less sensitive to it, and absorption high in the atmosphere is left out. The narration is the built-in voice, and the video was rendered at 1080×1920 and 30 fps.