-
what colour is the Sun?Permalink Look on archive.org
♻️ 1 Retweets Mood 0
-
(no, not white, for the purposes of this tweet that is not a colour)Permalink Look on archive.org
-
I guess my contention is that it isn't really a perceivable colour, as we perceive colour as (in most circumstances) relative to the colour of the light sources illuminating them. And if you can see the sun it's almost certainly the dominant source of light.Permalink Look on archive.org
-
however! as anyone who has corrected the white balance of a RAW photo knows, daylight skews kind of blue, certainly in comparison to incandescent bulbs.Permalink Look on archive.org
-
so why is yellow the traditional sun colour? well, different hues are perceived as having different brightnesses, and of these, yellow is the brightest. the sun is very bright, and so feels least wrong.Permalink Look on archive.org
-
also the atmosphere, dust, etc gives the sun an orangey cast - at times when the sun has been sufficiently dimmed by this to become something you can easily look at, it is actually a yellowy colour.Look on archive.org
-
thinking about this some more, i think i would kind of like to make a half hour youtube video about that fact that "colour" is super complicated & use "what colour is the sun?" as the throughline question. but also that seems like a load of work, so i probably won'tPermalink Look on archive.org