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Old 01-August-2006, 11:22 AM
grant hutchison grant hutchison is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by George
There was nothing new under the sun I found in the article with the exception of the metamer suggestion of adding violet to blue to obtain blue (that seems a little odd, but I may have misunderstood it).
Indeed. The whole story has been around for a long time, and is covered as such in many standard textbooks. Craig Bohren gives a succinct summary (Section 2:3 in the linked article, including mention of metamerism). John Naylor addresses the eye's sensitivity as it affects the blueness of the sky in Out of the Blue, as does Marcel Minnaert in Light and Color in the Outdoors: and those are just the first three reference sources I lifted off the shelf.

Indeed, Phil seems to have done more background research than Glenn Smith, since in his section on the blue sky (Chapter 4) he explains why the sky doesn't appear violet, and mentions that: "... your eye is more sensitive to blue light than it is to violet."

I can only guess that Smith restricted his browsing to basic physics texts, which were trying to teach about scattering, rather than specifically about the blue sky.

Grant Hutchison
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