Asklemmy

43290 readers

1141 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

Star actually have colors (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago by SnotBubble@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

49 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Slice@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago

You can only get this effect in the center of your visual field due to the organization of your retina where you have color vision. The rest of your eye is much more sensitive to light so you can see dim stars more easily in your periphery by looking away from them a bit. Maybe you can use your own biology to help enjoy the night sky even more! If you get a friend, you can use colored pen caps and get them to hold them in your periphery and tell them what color it is. You don't be able to until they reach the color vision part of your visual field if you stay looking forward.

It's trippy, but your brain fills in color for you a lot of the time.