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Light can interact with the environment and be modified to produce color, without itself modifying the environment. Light, interacting with raindrops, forms a rainbow, by being refracted into its component colors. Light scattered from the sky is blue whereas its complement, the unscattered light, seen at sunset, is red/yellow. Many examples of natural color, as in the colored wings of butterflies and peacocks, derive from the optical properties of light and its modification through such processes as scattering, refraction, diffraction and interference.

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