Starship Asterisk*

Oh goodie, I love these kinds of polls! Hmmmmm... for me as a galaxy lover, the galaxy fare was unusually unsustaining here, although it was a lot of fun to see a supernova go off! Bravo! The resolution was kind of iffy, though. The Eagle nebula was beautiful, and the color of it was so much better ...

Oh my god!!!! The Kraken! Markus Maximus, I love it!!!!!

Ann

But hah! Art! You have almost convinced me! Who would be the greatest ever authority on the color of the Sun, if not Shakespeare? I bow to your erudition and insight, if not to your sense of color, oh grand master of wisdom and blank verse! :owl: I think I do believe in you and Will, so the Sun must...

It isn't the intent of most scientific astronomical imagers to produce results that show some sort of actual color. The intent is to ascertain what makes up objects, and to see structure. Yes, it is obvious that that is the kind of astronomy that the Hubble telescope usually does. And I don't consi...

As blue as you think it should. What you see is not necessarily what other people see. What you term "true color" is true... to you. Point taken. But do you think, all things considered, that it is a good idea to show the overall stellar populations of NGC 3310 and M 104 as having the sam...

I've just been going on about how I need astro-images to show objects in "true color" for me to appreciate them. And, yeah, yeah, I know that infrared images just can't ever be "true color" (because they depict objects and structures that are colorless in themselves, stupid). Wel...

Maybe your "absolute color sense" makes it difficult for you to separate the two; perhaps this is analogous to someone's with perfect (or absolute) pitch being bothered when singing or playing (early music) at A415 Hz rather than the modern tuning of A440 Hz. Interesting. I think you are ...

Good question, Owlice. To be honest, I'm frustrated about the way that everything is "shifted to the red" in astronomy, and now I'm not talking about what we know as redshift! No, my problem is that blue stars like Vega are described as white (that's a shift to the red), white stars like t...

But as directly viewed from the ground, the Sun is perceptually yellow! You mean, when you stare at the Sun to ascertain its color? :shock: So all these images are actually correct, other than being too saturated. "Too saturated" is only their middle name. I, too, admit that the light of ...

Note, however, that Vegans can only see GREEN. Belatedly: :lol: :lol: :lol: Chris wrote: Sometimes G stars are called yellow stars. In terms of visual appearance, the Sun is white. In terms of stellar classification, it is yellow. Again, I don't see the problem. What's the problem, Chris? Well, the...

Pluto is a planet. Uh-uh, Chris! Are you one of those Harvard guys who get their news in a bottle? http://static-p3.fotolia.com/jpg/00/01/23/78/400_F_1237869_UEbL05TzDNFGnfXY4RyqDjFue18NO3.jpg These are the only ones of which The news has come to Ha'vard And there may be many others But they haven'...

For example, in green plants, the action spectrum resembles the absorption spectrum for chlorophylls and carotenoids with peaks for violet-blue and red light.

So our plants would do even better with the violet-blue light of blue (not white) Vega, then?

Ann

As for Albireo, let me say that when I see that star I don't compare the color of the two components with each other, I compare the yellow component with other yellow stars that I see "in my mind's eye", and the blue component with other blue stars whose color I remember. That is why I was...

By the way, thank you for your Don Quixote and Seinfeld references. I'm not absolutely sure what they meant, but I always appreciate a chance to feel cuturally sophisticated. It so happens that I like Superman too, at least when he spends his days with Lois Lane. (Get that Tom Welling boy away from ...

And yet, I see the pair as strikingly colorful; I'd describe the yellow component as far more saturated than Arcturus, and the blue component as the most blue of any stars I observe. Yes, I realize that most people respond to Albireo the way you do, but I think I have a bit of an "absolute&quo...

Well, there was no way I could not vote for the galaxy group with that little blue rascal bursting with hot new stars and nebulae. I love that stuff, and it gets even better when those starburst galaxies are seen close to an old yellow elliptical. What a contrast. Wow. Okay, but even I have to admit...

I have read a bit of this before, but it is really interesting. Thanks for posting.

Ann

Chris wrote: But the apparent color of a star also depends heavily on the colors of reference stars around it. I don't agree. When I checked out the colors of stars, one of my biggest disappointments was Albireo. I had expected a vividly colorful binary made up of one brashly golden-orange primary a...

Well, hmmm. That "sex days" thing was a little funny, I'll grant you that. :oops: On the other hand: http://www.wikihow.com/Count-in-Swedish As for the colorful graph you posted, it could be that I'm all wrong, but it sure looks to me that even the graph admits that a star whose temperatur...

Again, the important point is that stellar colors are a measure of the emission peak, and not of the apparent color to the eye. Visually the Sun is white; spectrally it is yellow. There is no contradiction here. Are you sure that the Sun isn't green as defined from its spectral peak? I, at least, h...

And I still can't accept the claim that the color of the Sun is "yellowish white". I think it's a pure white, and there is a very simple explanation for its color. It's because our eyes are naturally adapted to seeing the brightest source of light as white, and the brightest source of ligh...

brown (color=#770000) actually is really pretty much purely red (color=#FF0000) with the intensity turned down. But brown color can also be a purely yellow color with the intensity turned down. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Color_icon_brown.svg/300px-Color_icon_brown.svg....

Sex days?

You got me there, neufer. I'm a Swede, and in Sweden "six" (6) is written and pronounced "sex". No kidding. And I was in a hurry when I wrote that post, so I had no time to check it too closely.

Ann

Yes, Bystander, I understand that. The point I have been trying to make the whole time is that the traditional Harvard color classification of spectral classes are really misclassifications. I was trying to see if I could get either of you to admit that. :wink: The way I see it, there is no way that...

I found a spectrum of Vega which clearly suggests that the peak output of light from Vega is square in the middle of the blue part of the spectrum, near 480 nm: http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/spectrum-vega-01s-plot.jpg The spectrum of the Sun peaks in the yellow-green part of the spectrum, no...