Which is more transparent in it's absolute purest form; pure water or pure atmospheric air? Which has the highest (furthest) visibility to the naked human eye?

its going to be atmosphere. even the clearest bodies of water are not all that "clear"

and water in the atmosphere is what decreases visiblity.

This post was edited by lone500 on Mar 15 2012 05:41pm

Indeed.

This is, of course, brought about by H2O's electonegativity.

I'm not talking about earthly bodies where contaminants could be present. I mean in a hypothetical body of absolutely pure H2O next to a hypothetical body of absolutely pure atmospheric air. Both of these bodies would of course be surrounded by a vacuum.

Which would be more transparent?

Water if you were to base it off of mass.

Hmm that's true, density would probably affect it. Lets say the volume of both bodies is identical as well as the density. What then?

Then I would assume their transparency would be equivalent.

Hmm, so transparency of a body is determined by the contaminants present? What is making the contaminants themselves opaque rather than transparent?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index

Air has a lower refractive index than water, so light passes through it at a higher speed and is absorbed less

Pure water is clearly defined as H2O, what is pure air?