Bad Astronomy has posted an article on the topic of star colors today. Phil Plait, the author, found a website that has reduced star colors to hex code and RGB values. As anyone who does visualization for a living knows, the world is a complex place and trying to reduce anything down to a single color gives you a Crayola Land feel. It is tough, when rendering, to get something that looks right, for all sorts of lighting tricks come into play. In the end he has, what I think, is a wonderful conclusion.
I think the real lesson here is that something we think of as simple — color — is not at all simple! The way colors are emitted by an object, the way our eyes detect color, and most importantly the way our brains interpret that signal, are actually extraordinarily complex processes. I think that’s a very important concept to keep in mind when pondering pretty much any issue: what we take for granted as simple is almost never any such thing.
By the way, if we have red, white, and blue stars, why are there no green stars?
