Great article. Ummm... dumb question, but... stars are colored? (Color blind poster here).
But I distinctly remember my young eyes, probably when I was 4, that the the stars had a lot more color than they do now. I remember talking about it with my mother while she was driving one night.
I score fairly high on color acuity tests, and gravitated toward a job in color printing in my 20s, and learned color management. I matched so many colors in CMYK and CMYKOG by hand, because the color models used to calculate color differences and tolerances do a poor job of modeling the response of the human eye to color. Since then the models have improved, but they still need work. Given what this article describes, this makes complete sense. You are mapping two very different mathematical spaces from one to the other. One based around specific pigments with specific values, and the other based around differential curves between color receptors with overlapping ranges.
Antares, for example, is one I can consistently see as red.
It's just after full Moon and Mars is just next to the Moon, hence also on max luminosity.
Anyway, somehow my two friends started looking at color blindness tests. One of them had grown up in Latin America and hadn't seen a color blindness test before, so the other was explaining how there's a number in the center that you can't see if you're color blind. And he said... "what number?" That was how he learned at age 26 that he was color blind.
They do, however, twinkle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twinkling
And while twinkling, I catch glimpses of red, yellow, blue or others. Of course, this is very subjective and that wikipedia page doesn't mention colour changing at all.
Not a mass of little coloured dots.
Mars is very close and red these days, which I hadn't noticed before. I got quite giddy when I first saw a "colored dot" in the sky a few days ago and now most of my evening runs are motivated by getting a glimpse of the bright red planet. :)
A few weeks more until it starts rising early and isn't distinguishable anymore.
When the sky is dark, red stars are very distinctive, I don't think even color blind people would have a problem. (I am color blind, but I confuse blue and green, not red and green.)
Both yellow and blue stars emit blueish and yellowish light, and are much harder to tell apart.
As an added bonus, red stars are the first to disappear against a lit sky :(
> "The color of a star, as determined by the most intense frequency of the visible light, depends on the temperature of the star's outer layers, including its photosphere."
Do you think you might be a tetrachromat?
'endogui linked to an article that talks about this: I don't think it's all that unusual.