We used to log “Sun-likes” with a garage telescope, a Commodore 64, and a lot of guesswork. If it looked yellow and didn’t blink, it made the list. Half of them were porch lights, but we stood by our catalog.
We used to log “Sun-likes” with a garage telescope, a Commodore 64, and a lot of guesswork. If it looked yellow and didn’t blink, it made the list. Half of them were porch lights, but we stood by our catalog.
One of the comments on that page mentions that we see the G-class stars like the Sun as "yellowish", but in fact they are white, like a LED lamp with a color temperature of 5500 K or 6000 K.
The reason for this is not mentioned there, which is that the atmosphere of the Earth acts like a low-pass filter for the direct light that comes from the Sun or from a star, converting the white light into yellowish light. The missing bluish light is diffused over the sky, giving it its blue color. The night sky is also blue, but at a many times lower luminance, so that it seems black.
On the Moon, the Sun will appear as perfectly white, on a perfectly black sky.
We accounted for that by calibrating against a halogen desk lamp and my uncle’s welding arc. Anything in between was classified as “solar-adjacent.” Worked fine unless the neighbor lit his barbecue.
lol, sounds like a reddit bot commenting with max snark ;)
Bot? I’ve been manually backing up my emails to cassette since ’98. If I was a bot, my tapes wouldn’t squeal during thunderstorms.