Schollers are pryed into of late and found to bee busye fellows, disturbers of the Peace. Ile say no more

June 26, 2013 § Leave a comment

You can think of this as what the eye would see if we put all the light in the Universe through a prism to produce a rainbow. The intensity of the color is in proportion to it’s intensity in the Universe.

So what is the average color? i.e. the color an observer would see if they had the Universe in a box, and could see all the light at once (and it wasn’t moving, for a real observer on earth, the further away a galaxy from us the more it is redshifted. We have de-redshifted all our light before combining).

To answer this question we must compute the average response of the human eye to these colors. How do we express this color? The most objective way to is quote the CIE x,y values which specify the color’s location in the CIE chromaticity diagram and hence the stimulus the eye would see. Any spectrum with the same x,y must give the same perceived color. These numbers are (0.345,0.345) and they are robust, we have calculated them for different sub-samples of the 2dF survey and they vary insignificantly. We have even computed them for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopic survey (which will overtake 2dFGRS as the biggest redshift survey sometime in 2002) and they are essentially the same.

But what is the actual color? Well to do this we have to make some assumptions about human vision and the degree of general illumination. We also need to know what monitor you, the reader, are using! read more

PHOTOGRAPH: M John Harrison

Tagged: 2df galaxy redshift survey, cie chromaticity diagram, cosmic latté, cosmic spectrum, european southern observatory, fraunhofer lines, ivan baldry, karl glazebrook, light wavelengths, mark fairchild, munsell color laboratories, sloan digital sky survey, star formation, the colour of the universe

my nerves are bad to-night