Starship Asterisk*

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...

One more thing about the color of Vega. I think that people very often "see what they expect to see". If they are told by other people that stars are either white, yellow, orange or red, then those are the colors they are going to see when they look at the stars. That's why they may "...

Thank you for the graph, Art. I have seen it before, but I haven't really studied it, and it is very interesting. Stars emit light of many colors, so their light is never a pure primary color, except, I believe, the light of really cool "brown" dwarfs. They are really purely red. My point ...

Thank you for your answer, and I agree. But do you think that the Sun ought to be defined as a yellow star? On what grounds should it be defined as yellow? Vega is defined as the ultimate white star. But when I have looked at it through a telescope, it has looked definitely bluish to me. Mirfak, an ...

It's a truism that our Sun is yellow. So why is daylight not yellow if daylight is sunlight?

Ann

Well, that's a golden oldie which was a spectacular picture at its time. Now, though, there are many images of the center of the Milky Way which are just so much better. As for this picture, I wonder what scale we are talking about. I think there are a couple of HII regions in the upper right of the...

So maybe there is no theory of everything. Then again maybe there is one, if we keep searching for it. But in any case, whether there is a grand Theory of Everything or not, astronomers keep making new amazing discoveries about space all the time. That's enough for me. Just think of all the fantasti...

I don't know about you, but I find it interesting that the more scientists find out about other solar systems, the more seeming oddballs they find out there. Admittedly, there is so very much we don't know about other solar systems. Our telescopes aren't good enough to even detect Earth-size, Earth-...