Universe Pale Turquoise, On Average

An Anonymous Coward writes: "AP is reporting that the average color of the universe is a "sprightly" turquoise-green. If only they'd known before the new iMacs came out! Link is to Salon.com."

Little known fact

Our sun is actually pale green in color. So that's yet another thing that makes us average.

Re:Little known fact

The website you're linking to says that it is correct to claim that the color of the Sun is green because the Sun's peak wavelength is in the green part of the visible spectrum.

Bullshit.

Start with any light whose energy is broad on the spectrum, add a low energy but very narrowly focused spike of green, and these guys would call the color "green" because of a single spike on a spectrogram. Color perception is computed by an integral of intensity over wavelength, not by looking at the highest intensity peek.

Please stop trying to be interesting by repeating misleading nonsense that is only true when distorting the most technical jargon.

Re:Little known fact

Bullshit.

Start with any light whose energy is broad on the spectrum, add a low energy but very narrowly focused spike of green, and these guys would call the color "green" because of a single spike on a spectrogram. Color perception is computed by an integral of intensity over wavelength, not by looking at the highest intensity peek.

To nit-pick, because it's 1:30am and I'm bored:

The sun's emission spectrum is a blackbody curve. Most of its light emission is near the high-frequency end of this curve. Thus, if the peak is in the green range, most of the rest of its light emission will be *near* that range.

While I agree that the sun doesn't look green ("yellow-white" was the term used by the FAQ referred to previously), to say that the argument is completely misleading is silly. This isn't a little, narrow spike - it's a great big wide peak at the crest of a quickly rising curve.

And on that note, I'm going to bed.

Re:Little known fact

Only on slashdot can one read a flamewar between intelligent people on what color the sun is.

What color is the sun in YOUR world?

Color swatch according to the article

The article points out that the RGB triple is (0.269, 0.388, 0.342). Assuming this is out of a scale from 0->1, and scaling to 0->255, we get values (69, 99, 87) (roughly), or 0x456357. This gives a color swatch that looks like this. The background of this box is the color they claim... seems kinda dark compared to their description.

It's nice to know

that Mother Nature's decorating tastes are stuck in the 1950's.

Indians knew this, I bet

One wonders if the indians have always understood this. Some northern Arizona/NM tribes have used the various shades of turquoise as money and adornment, as well as in religious and artistic creations for a long time. In fact, they consider themselves to be turquoise (not red), according to an article [yahoo.com] I found.

Re:Indians knew this, I bet

Or perhaps it could be because turquoise is abundant in the south west and stands out against the brown and red rock of the desert. Humans love rare, shiny things and turquoise was the SW tribes' version of gold.

My T-shirt

I have a T-shirt that is a lovely shade of 420 MeV and, I think, a rather tasefull spin correlation coefficient that highlights my dandieness.

iMacs

If only they'd known before the new iMacs came out!

Implication being that God "thought different"? Or is that "thunk different" in Apple advertising grammar, since it's "think different" instead of "think differently"?

The Color of the Universe

Well, given that the colors are indeed given as normed values, essentially all they give us is a hue and a saturation, no luminosity. Assuming a full luminosity (highest given # is is equal to FF), it easily computes to:
RED:0xB1
GREEN:0xFF
BLUE:0xE1
I used the WinXP Powertoys calculator...and actually, it gives decimals...err....well, it puts a . into hex numbers and gives you what probably amounts to 1/16, 1/256, etc. places after it....just in case anyone's interested.
--me(who else?)

Isn't it obvious, really?

They're talking about the visible spectrum, which is a slice out of a much broader range of frequencies. If you take an arbitrary slice out of an evenly distributed set of data, you would expect the average to be right in the middle, which is roughly where turquoise lies, so surely this is statistical nonsense.

Ok

So I understand Red and Blue shifting, Does this mean I now have to understand green shifting as well.

(Greeen shifting when you and an object are not moveing closer or away from one another)

In related news

The IIDA, International Interior Decorators Association, has started to lobby NASA and Congress for funds to purchase paint, rollers and brushes with. They are claiming that this horrid turquoise color is just not the image that we as an up coming species want to present to the Universe. They plan on using more lively, vibrant colors in the redecorated galaxy.

This is.... useless

How did this tell us anything we didn't already know? Aside from the "visible" spectrum being a small and arbitrary slice of the pie (woo, it's what humans can see, it must be important) we already knew that the majority of stars are massive bright blue ones, because the universe isn't out of large clouds of hydrogen for massive stars to form yet. Therefore it's obvious that the average of all visible light would be greenish.

This discovery is like proclaiming the "average" of all the atoms currently existing is carbon or oxygen, its moronic.

Egads

Kermit the Frog was right, 'It's not easy being green!'