11:670:101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Crepuscular Rays, Sunred Engineering, Radiant Energy
11 May 2020
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Document Summary
Either absorbed, reflected, scattered or transmitted through. Radiant energy from the sun travels outward in the form of electromagentic waves. Rods and cones in human eyes are stimulated. White ligth: mix of all visible wavelengths strike our eyes with nearly equal intensity (sun=red through viloet) Objects appear black when no energy strike our eye (night sky= no energy reaching our eye) Sunlight bounces off a surface at the same angle at which it strikes the surface. Clouds appear white because cloud droplets scattered all wavelengths of visble sunlight in all directions. Taller clouds: more light is refelcted, less light transmitted through. Clouds appear darker when more light is absorbed than scattered. Each oxygen and nitrogen air molecules scatters shorter waves of visible light (violet, blue green) much more effectively than longer waves (yellow, organce, red) This is why the sky looks blue. Tiny particles are released by vegetation to combine chemically with small ozone amounts.
