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The moon, the planets, and the
STARS are visible in color to the human eye. Deep space
objects like nebulae and galaxies are not. That's because the
moon, planets and stars are bright, whereas deep space objects
like nebulae are dim, and the human eye cannot distinguish
color in dim light.
The
moon and planets shine at us with reflected light. The stars
supply their own, and they openly display their genuine
personalities; their true colors; the stuff they're made of.
The many colors we see of stars are validations of their true
identities. And some of them display those identities with
striking boldness! For instance, aging carbon stars glow red;
hot young stars are white or bluish; aging giants appear
orange and red-orange. There are other colors such as violet,
purple, pink, and even green and blue-green (although the
color green in stars is an illusion). Our own Sun is
yellow.
The
page you see here is the result of an ongoing effort to render
a Double Star Catalog of unsurpassed quality. Wherever
possible, the colors shown represent an accurate rendition of
actual observations.
At
left are just two examples of the many attractive double stars
posted on our Double Star Drawings
page.
In our
Drawings you may notice that some doubles are presented in
more than one color combination. That's because on subsequent
nights they appeared differently, due in large part to changes
in local atmospheric conditions. In these cases we offer more
than one rendition, as we're not sure which one is most
accurate. Keep in mind that we make no claim as accomplished
artists or cartographers.
Note: Our website is rendered with Netscape
Composer. This utility, though very adequate, is not without
its crappy little bugs. One of these annoying bugs is its
insistance on deleting spaces after a colored font. You may
notice that we had to include invisible periods after each
color indicator so the text would not "bunch-up". We tried to
catch them all. Every now and then we find more and we fix
them. |