What Makes Iowa’s Sunsets so Frickin’ Beautiful?
Nationally, Iowa belongs to a group known as the 'Flyover States.'
There's a ton of corn, farmland, open roads, and most people have only heard of Des Moines. In 2019, the population of the state capital was 215,636. Some from large cities may even still consider that to be a small town.
There is one thing that Iowa and some of the flyover states have that cities on the coasts can't match.
The sunsets here are unreal.
The color variety of orange, yellow, red, pink, and blue along with the few lakes we have and the growth of trees can make the Iowa evening sky in difficult to believe.
But what makes them so overwhelmingly gorgeous?
According to weareiowa.com,
The sun emits electromagnetic energy at a wide range of frequencies. Only a small portion of that energy, however, can be seen by the human eye.
As you may have learned in a middle school science class, the visible spectrum to us contains all of the color of the rainbow, including different hues of each color. The differences in color are due to the varieties in wavelength.
The site continues:
Colors like violet and blue have shorter wavelengths, and are more likely to be scattered in all directions by the gases that make up Earth's atmosphere.
This explains, quite simply, why the sky is blue.
The sky has its color at that time due to the wavelengths being shorter.
We Are Iowa adds this:
On the other hand, light has to travel a much farther distance through the atmosphere before it reaches our eyes at both sunrise and sunset.
That longer path typically causes the blue color to disappear, but colors with longer wavelengths - like reds, oranges, and yellows - stick around.
Yup, there ya go.