True Colours Of The Solar Corona, By Miloslav Druckmüller

A TOTAL eclipse. What do you see? Well, best not to look, you may go blind. But what is the color of the solar corona?

The majority of people perceive the corona during eclipse as white or slightly greenish-white. However bluish-white, yellowish-white or reddish-white are often reported too. The problem is in the color perception by human vision which is dependent on the definition (calibration) of white color. The less the color differs from white i.e. the less is the color saturated the more critical is the precision of white color calibration. If we use the natural definition that photospheric light is white, we may distinguish very small but still well detectable differences of solar corona coloring. Suppressing the white color component i.e. increasing of color saturation enables detailed study of the color variation throughout the inner corona.

Humans don’t see all the colours. Imagine if you could?

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Anorak

Posted: 7th, December 2008 | In: Photojournalism, Strange But True Comment (1) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink