Kobenhabn, 12x12” Archival Pigment Print, 2024
There has long been a fascination with the color of the Sky. Horace Benedict Saussure created a device with various pieces of paper colored in shades of blue to take measurements of the color of the sky. In 1876 he climbed Mont Blanc and he held up these swatches of color to measure the blueness of the sky. He later developed the Cyanometer, which was a circle of paper containing swatches of blue graduated from the lightest tone to the darkest. The color he measured on Mont Blanc he determined was of the 39th degree of darkness. He thought the darkness at Mont Blanc was due to the high altitude. In the 1860’s when the cause of the skies blueness was found the Cyanometer fell out of favor. In 1871 John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh discovered that blue light waves are shorter and are scattered more strongly and these blue waves reach our eyes appearing blue. The phenomenon is known as Rayleigh Scattering.