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Old 08-March-2006, 11:13 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HenrikOlsen
The way I see it, we've evolved to see "white" things illuminated during the day as "white".
As they are illuminated both by the sun and the blue scattered light from the rest of the sky, the color we percieve as white is the color of the sun with some blue added, which is why the sun itself looks slightly yellow.
Evolving to a white appearnce for daylight is interesting and makes sense.

However, surprisingly, the sun radiates with peak intensity in blue. The atmosphere does take about half of the blue, not just scattering effects though. The energy level for each wavelength (spectral irradiance) is almost flat when observing the sun from the surface.

It is also interesting to see a flat curve for the sun in space if the curve plots the distribution of photons (using E=h*nu).
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