While camping, I noticed that if you look long enough at almost any star, you start seeing some tiny, subtle colors in that star. Even crazier, they sometimes flicker between more colors. In my case orange, blue and something like cyan.
Besides constellations, what else could you observe regarding starts, with the naked eye?
Don’t think this is true. I didn’t find any good sources. Wikipedia mainly talks about sunlight like it arrives down here. But if you google ‘sun spectrum’ the images that show up look more like the peak is in the blue range.
Also mind your eyes aren’t perfect measuring devices. Their sensitivity also isn’t linear. For example we’re more sensitive to green light if I remember correctly. Because of evolution and lots of things in nature are green.
Its ‘true’. But we just call those kinds of stars white. Green is the middle wavelength we can see (because our suns output is centered there). It also outputs lots of all visible light though. Red stars and Blue stars are red or blue because their central output is shifted towards a different part of the EM spectrum, and red/blue are the outer wavelengths on either side.
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/GreenSun.html
Eye sensitivity comment is good point too, I didn’t think of that.
I don’t quite get why they say ‘the Sun’s visible output peaks in the green’. And immediately follow that up with a diagram where the peak is somewhere between blue and cyan… Or are my eyes off?
Yea I don’t really get it either. My physics is not particularly strong though.
The 2nd image, to me, seems to show that green has a wider amount of emitted green light:
http://solar-center.stanford.edu/SID/activities/images/solar_spectrum_composite.jpg
I hope I don’t sound too argumentative, because I really don’t actually care too much about the exact color of sunlight. But I think this is a diagram from earth’s perspective. It has these dents in the longer wavelengths where certain frequencies get absorbed by elements it traveled through, and the UV is filtered out. Both indicators it went through the atmosphere.
What they’re really saying is that the dominant wavelength our sun emits is around 500 nm. Which by definition is green light. Astronomers also call everything heavier than helium a metal, which isn’t true but that’s how they work.