Color of the Night Sky (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Color of the Night Sky (2019)

clarkvision.com

118 pointspinkbeanz15 comments

I teach painting and many of the points I make in class are covered by this resource. Importantly, that the sky is almost always the brightnest thing in a landscape, even at night and that colour vision at night is poor. Great resource.

The sky is bright against the landscape if you're far enough away from civilization. In an urban environment, the night sky is black with some stars at best, blue or pink at worst, and spots of artificial light overpower it here and there.

Even really far away, in complete darkness, with the sky literally covered by a million stars, the sky mostly remains pitch black to the naked eye, with very faint bits of color from planets like Mars, some stars, and some nebulae. It's as black as the line of the forest that obscures it, which you only vcan see by the way it covers the stars.

Unfortunately, all these beautiful colors from the article are mostly invisible to a naked human eye. Long-exposure shots are the best chance to register these colors, telescopes help, but only for a tiny bit if the sky.

See Orion's belt? Pretend that's a straight line. Now look perpendicular to it in both directions and you come to some fairly bright stars about the same distance both ways. One of those is red/orange and the other is blue/green. Visible to the naked eye even in an urban setting.

Yes, can confirm, Betelgeuse is reddish, and Rigel is bluish, I see it nearly every night when Orion is high enough above horizon right in NYC. Mars was prominent a few weeks ago, also pretty orange. But their colors are not bright hues, not like LEDs; rather, they have some hint of color to me.

And, of course, they are but small dots, and the sky is vast and (in an urban setting) rather empty; there are few sufficiently bright stars, and of course nothing comparable to the colorful glow of space dust, nebulae, or even a noticeable atmosphere glow, except for backlight of the city.

Orion’s Belt isn’t visible in many urban settings

The belt is hard to see, but Betelgeuse is pretty prominent.

Venus, Jupiter, and even Mars become visible in twilight, when the sky is still comparatively bright (has intense color).

Yes, it's not visible indoors.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230218154249/https://clarkvisi...

I love finding gems like these. I would never come across them if not for HN. How do you guys find these?

everyone has different hobbies. there was a time when i knew what the forecast at night in much more detail than the day specifically for making plans for viewing the stars. most people don't know what the current phase of the moon is, but it's the face of my watch. most people (not on this site) don't know what the difference between [] and {} would be. how many people know what the term top dead center references? how many people actually know that there's a proper term for the sideline on a football pitch other than sideline? how many people know exactly how many episodes are in DBZ or One Piece? on and on and on

> how many people know what the term top dead center references?

Isn't that a petrolhead reference? I thought it was the position of the camshaft in an ICE that places cylinder 1 at maximum compression.

/me not a petrolhead, nor even a driver.

Dr. Clark is pretty active on Reddit. He's helped me process astrophotography data in the past, particularly when using DSLRs

http://reddit.com/u/rnclark

Reddit's astrophotography community is top-notch. The comments sections are often more interesting and informative than the headlines and photos.

Truly some pockets of gems in the rough on that site.

What is going on with the comments here? I've never seen such blatant comment spam on HN before.

Yeah, it's on some other posts too.

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