Methane Blue

a reply to: luxordelphi

You're really not getting this, are you?

Neptune LOOKS blue to you, because all the blue light is being REFLECTED back to you.

That means: VERY LITTLE to NO blue light is getting through down into Neptune.

Place a lot more methane in our atmosphere (the amount needed would suffocate all of us), would NOT give us blue skies! The blue light from the sun would be reflected back and not reach the surface.

More methane in out atmosphere will not make our skies look "bluer".

What part of that do you not understand?

originally posted by: magnecore
Mostly white skies here. Maybe half a dozen blue skies per month.

And I can empathize with that...mostly pale - very pale - blue skies here. Once in a while though, like today, there is a patch, through the artificial cloud cover, of a deep blue. A navy blue...almost a blue-black. And sometimes, at night, to the north, there is a sense of the old sky, the sky of my youth, as it were.

a reply to: eriktheawful

It would, due to the red scatter, with the blue mixed in, look: Purple.

Now that's interesting. Although finding a vantage point on a gas giant is iffy. Why do you think there would be red scatter instead of blue? Earth, after all, looks blue (used to look blue) from inside or outside. Why would Neptune look any different?

originally posted by: luxordelphi

originally posted by: magnecore
Mostly white skies here. Maybe half a dozen blue skies per month.

And I can empathize with that...mostly pale - very pale - blue skies here. Once in a while though, like today, there is a patch, through the artificial cloud cover, of a deep blue. A navy blue...almost a blue-black. And sometimes, at night, to the north, there is a sense of the old sky, the sky of my youth, as it were.

There would probably be a few more, but it takes a day or two for the white haze to settle out of the lower ground level. Once that happens, we might get a day of crystal clear blue sky, then right back to the white marbled skies.

originally posted by: abecedarian
If methane makes Neptune look blue to us because of it reflecting blue light, wouldn't that mean little to no blue light would reach the surface?

And therefore, the sky at the surface would look more red to yellow?

This is a terrific question that I don't know the answer to. Tritan, moon of Jupiter, has a lot of methane (rivers etc.) but its' sky is tangerine BUT it's a moon so how much atmosphere can it have.

Further, because Neptune is a gas giant, the concept of surface is up for grabs. I like eriktheawfuls' idea of purple skies though and that bears some thought. Except that for purple skies, the concentration would have to be (I think) 1000 times what it is now and we're still alive so that can't be. What concentration would augment our blue sky without killing us is unknown.

a reply to: luxordelphi

Because, and I'm not trying to insult you here, you are not understanding what you are reading.

Take a look at this picture:



The Rayleigh scattering in opalescent glass makes it look blue, because it is reflecting blue light back.

However, take a look at the light hitting the ground: it's an orange/yellow color.

If our atmosphere had the same concentrations of methane that it had 2.5 billion years ago (thousands of times more than now), the Earth would look very blue from space.

But people on the ground (wearing oxygen tanks because concentrations of methane high enough to change the sky color would kill us) would not see a blue sky. They would see more purple color due to red scatter.

So a deep rich blue sky means that we have lots of oxygen. Guess what color oxygen is when we compress it into a liquid?

Blue.

originally posted by: Aloysius the Gaul
Actually any blue sky you see is due to chemtrails containing "Manganese di-Bromo di-Fluoro-Benzidine (salts)" - it's on Rense AND Aircrap - so it must be true.

No, Gaul, the OP link is from space.com via Yahoo BUT awhile back (some years ago) there was something being developed that could make the sky look blue. Some silver compound like what is used in cloud seeding. Or photography.

But this is not what I mean. I mean increased methane concentrations in the atmosphere making the sky blue despite massive pollution. Because that's what methane does on Neptune.

a reply to: luxordelphi

Titan's atmosphere is actually 1.45 time more dense than Earth's. It's a moon, but it has almost twice the mass of our moon.

The atmosphere on Titan at it's surface is 95% nitrogen, and just under 5% methane (not enough to make the moon look blue like Neptune).

The tan or brown haze we see is from hydrocarbons that are in the atmosphere (smog).

a reply to: eriktheawful

The sky above had a deep blue look

Is this a Freudian slip? Because that's exactly the way I see it.

a reply to: eriktheawful

Place a lot more methane in our atmosphere (the amount needed would suffocate all of us), would NOT give us blue skies! The blue light from the sun would be reflected back and not reach the surface.

Sorry I am so slow to catch on here. So you are saying that first, as methane concentration increased in our atmosphere, we would see a faint pink quality to the light. Things would get slightly dimmer. As the concentration increased, our quality of sunlight would go from pinkish to orange until, at some point, we would dwell in perpetual twilight. And then purple would overtake the sky.

Twilight Time

a reply to: luxordelphi


For the record, jet's are releasing 0 methane into the atmosphere. You and I are releasing Methane from our brown eyes, so are all the animals we farm to eat, our pets, the bacteria eating our wastes, and the methane trapped from organic sources in the earth's crust. We call Methane natural gas because it's most often observed coming from organic sources on earth.

originally posted by: luxordelphi

No, Gaul, the OP link is from space.com via Yahoo BUT awhile back (some years ago) there was something being developed that could make the sky look blue......

Oh...so you're saying Rense and Aircrap are wrong about that then??

originally posted by: luxordelphi
So what seems worthwhile to me is to somehow avoid those methane skies by, perhaps, stopping jet emissions into the stratosphere.

What Jet emissions are you referring to? Regular flights, or proposed geo-engineering that isn't taking place yet?

originally posted by: luxordelphi
a reply to: eriktheawful

Place a lot more methane in our atmosphere (the amount needed would suffocate all of us), would NOT give us blue skies! The blue light from the sun would be reflected back and not reach the surface.

Sorry I am so slow to catch on here. So you are saying that first, as methane concentration increased in our atmosphere, we would see a faint pink quality to the light. Things would get slightly dimmer. As the concentration increased, our quality of sunlight would go from pinkish to orange until, at some point, we would dwell in perpetual twilight. And then purple would overtake the sky.

Twilight Time

No, that's not what I said

Methane reflects blue light and absorbs and scatters red light.

Oxygen and nitrogen absorbs and scatters blue light. (most gasses do this, they tend to block short wavelengths of light and let longer wavelengths through. )

Right now our air is made up of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% of everything else.

So let's start increasing the amount of methane (CH4) and instead of 21% oxygen, we instead have 11% and methane is now at 11%. 89% of our air is made of nitrogen and oxygen which absorbs and scatters blue light....but now we have 11% which absorbs and scatters red light.

At this point, most people that are not used to high altitudes are passing out or feeling shortness of breath until you climatize.

The sky above you will still look blue, but going towards the horizons, it will take on a bit more of a purple tinge.

Now increase the methane to 16% and decrease Oxygen to 5%.

Now all the humans are passed out and slowly dying. Not enough oxygen.

The purple tinge at the horizon will have creeped up higher into the sky.

Increase the methane to 21% and oxygen at less than 1% (humans are now all dead), the sky will have a violet tinge to it all the way up, except near the sun. It won't be completely purple because 78% of the atmosphere is still nitrogen (which is a inert, low reactive gas), and nitrogen absorbs and scatters blue light.

The key part to all of this is to understand this:

Methane (aka CH4), will reflect blue light and will absorb and scatter red light. The sun is shining down on us, therefor to see that blue reflected back, you'd have to be in space. However, we are not in space, but standing on the ground, where the blue light being reflected by the methane can not reach us. Instead, we would see red light (if all of the Earth's atmosphere was methane only).

Here is another way to think about it:
Let's say you have a special pair of sun glasses. The lens are made of CH4 (methane). Anyone looking at you while you are wearing them would see blue lenses.
YOU on the other hand, looking through the lenses would see everything in red.

a reply to: Zaphod58

if you were in the uk all you would see is grey skys , well at least in the north west .

a reply to: tom.farnhill

And yet, there are supposedly chemtrails spraying whatever is in them all over the US, that are supposedly causing those grey skies. But the only skies I see here are blue, and like I said, I'm all over the US every day.

a reply to: abecedarian

Have to correct my post to you which, in the cold light of morning, was incredibly slapdash. I meant Titan, not Tritan and it's a moon of Saturn, not Jupiter.

Extraterrestrial skies...The sky of Titan

Titan is the only moon in the solar system to have a thick atmosphere. Images from the Huygens probe show that the Titanean sky is a light tangerine color. However, an astronaut standing on the surface of Titan would see a hazy brownish/dark orange colour.

It seems likely that Saturn is permanently invisible behind orange smog, and even the Sun would only be a lighter patch in the haze, barely illuminating the surface of ice and methane lakes. However, in the upper atmosphere, the sky would have a blue color and Saturn would be visible.

originally posted by: Hijinx
a reply to: luxordelphi


For the record, jet's are releasing 0 methane into the atmosphere. You and I are releasing Methane from our brown eyes, so are all the animals we farm to eat, our pets, the bacteria eating our wastes, and the methane trapped from organic sources in the earth's crust. We call Methane natural gas because it's most often observed coming from organic sources on earth.

Since we're placing things on record here...I've got a few too: for the record, water vapor is the mother of greenhouse gases. Jets release more water vapor than the amount of fuel they start with (this is because of a chemical reaction.) Greenhouse gases cause global warming. The stratosphere was mostly water vapor free (very dry) before jets got ahold of it. Nobody but the unwashed really know what tons and tons of water vapor into the stratosphere will do to global warming (this is because the unwashed are living without air conditioning.) As the earth warms, because of greenhouse gases, methane deposits (which are substantial) get released. Capiche?

originally posted by: Aloysius the Gaul

originally posted by: luxordelphi

No, Gaul, the OP link is from space.com via Yahoo BUT awhile back (some years ago) there was something being developed that could make the sky look blue......

Oh...so you're saying Rense and Aircrap are wrong about that then??

You're a sly one, Gaul. I'm saying that I don't know about the manganese whatever - haven't read the articles you're so up in arms about and don't know squat about how manganese whatever might make skies bluer, or not.

As far as 'rense' goes - I've read other stuff there that I liked. As far as 'aircrap' goes, who wouldn't like a name that so correctly describes the current state of our atmosphere. A current state that you seem bent on white washing. (In a kind of catty Pollyanna way.) Tallyho!

a reply to: eriktheawful

Why would Rayleigh only scatter in one direction? In space, where planets are, there is no up or down. If I look through my sunglasses the wrong way, everything looks the same as when I look the right way.

Titan looks the same: inside or out. Earth looks the same: inside or out. You've got me wavering a bit on Neptune because there's no water vapor...only ice. And no free oxygen. Still...compressed ice is blue (without Rayleighs' intervention.)