The skies were brown last Saturday. High winds filled the air with sand and dust, blotting out everything beyond a quarter of a mile. Charles went out for the Saturday newspaper, and came back telling of white caps on the normally calm Lake Proctor.
The afternoon brought excitement to our area. The weekend before, a neighbor burned two big piles of brush. The embers were still alive enough, after a week, for the strong wind to whip them back into flame. Volunteer firemen and others drove back and forth by our house, trying to figure out how to get close enough to the fire to do any good. We kept an eye on the comings and goings, and I noticed that the trucks and pickups reflected a cool, blue light.
“Let’s go for a drive,” Charles suggested. Everything had a bluish cast to it. We drove over the lake again. The same blue light lit the brown waves. We had to go back for the camera, and here are a couple of the pictures we took. The opposite shores of the lake are close, but the dust was so thick, we couldn’t see them.
So why the blue light? Thanks to years of reading about color, I think I know. Sunlight contains
every color of light. If we see an object as green, it is because the object absorbs every color of light, except green light. It reflects the green light into our eyes, and we see green.
The dust in the air was brown, which is a combination of yellow and red tones. The billions of dust particles in the air reflected yellow and red light, changing its usual path. The air was so thick with dust, that much of the yellow and red light was probably bounced right back into the atmosphere.
The light that finally made it to us down here on the earth was disproportionately blue. That’s why we saw blue light reflected off of cars and water, and why less shiny objects, like grass and our skin, looked bluer than usual.
I love knowing about color.
