What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
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What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#2Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#3I know that they were trying to find the average wavelengths of visible light, and I loathe pedantry, but shouldn't the answer be "black"?
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#4I find it oddly appropriate that the average color of the universe is later described as the most boring color possible.
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#5edit: oops. My apologies, sodium is responsible for the dark band at ~5,890 I misread a graphic. Still looking into the spike...
If like me you just had to know what was responsible for the huge spike in the red (@ wavelength of about 6600 angstroms)....
Sodium.
Tangentially related (TIL) sodium also effects a star's end-of-life cycle: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how-s...
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#6I know that they were trying to find the average wavelengths of visible light, and I loathe pedantry, but shouldn't the answer be "black"?
In this context black is the absence of light, so it's disqualified right off the bat.
With a clear night and a good telescope there are a lot of stars out there. So I would say even the average color of the night sky looking out from earth wouldn't be black. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150101.html
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#7It's just an arbitrary wavelength. It's not that the universe is emitting a boring color, it's the fact that we interpret this color as beige and therefore boring.
The interesting thing we should be asking is why does our biology cause us to notice high wave lengths like red and find colors like beige to be really plain and boring.
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#8edit: oops. My apologies, sodium is responsible for the dark band at ~5,890 I misread a graphic. Still looking into the spike... If like me you just had to know what was responsible for the huge spike in the red (@ wavelength of about 6600 angstroms).... Sodium. Tangentially related (TIL) sodium also effects a star's end-of-life cycle: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130529-how-s...
In the spectrum graph (near the bottom) there are ¿two? light band at 4500-4600A but there is no spike in the graphic. All the other light bands have spikes and all the dark bands have valleys. Do you know what happened there?
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#9Priceonomics: We help companies crawl data from the web. Well, the article itself is indeed interesting, but I am just curious why they post these kind of content on their blog, is it related?
Re: What Is the Average Color of the Universe?
#10I know that they were trying to find the average wavelengths of visible light, and I loathe pedantry, but shouldn't the answer be "black"?
In this context black is the absence of light, so it's disqualified right off the bat. With a clear night and a good telescope there are a lot of stars out there. So I would say even the average color of the night sky looking out from earth wouldn't be black. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150101.html
I couldn't resist curiosity and had to analyze that apod image just to see...
Average Color (rgb): 62, 45, 51
Average Color (hex): #3E2D33
Average Color (visual): http://i.imgur.com/xDBeHqu.png
Source: http://pastebin.com/vckL3AP6
Credit: http://charlesmartinreid.com/wordpress/2012/08/python-image-averaging-and-color-averaging/ (with some cleanup)