This page here says “April’s night skies bring brightness to dark times. At dusk, Venus will burn with stunning intensity (at magnitude -4.5) in the western sky. Even with the unaided eye, the planet’s characteristic sulfurous yellow hue will be easy to see.”
My colour perception isn’t the best, but I always thought that Venus was silvery-white??
I think it depends on the angle formed by the sun, Venus, and the Earth. Sometimes it’s silver, sometimes it’s a little bit yellow.
It just looks white to me. Maybe in just the right conditions its yellowy color is more apparent.
It’s never looked yellowish to me, either. The fact that the clouds are sulfuric acid doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they’re clouds. Cloudlike structures of any material are going to look white.
When I saw it on June 8, 2004, it was black. See my avatar.
It always looks bright white to me.
Ditto. For me, Saturn always had a slightly yellow cast much more than Venus ever did.
I have heard that as human evolved under a yellow sun, we then to perceive slight yellowish tint in bright objects as white so that the Sun, Venus and most lightbulbs are translated in our brain so we think they’re white.
Not sure how true that is but I do know that our perception of an object’s color depends on a lot more than how wavelengths are absorbed by our cones.
Yeah, since when does the… checks notes… Sierra Club know anything about the natural world?
I think the brain sees what it expects to see and disregards the rest… dah dah dah…
Yeah, white to me as well. Maybe pearly white, at best, but definitely not yellowish.
Yellowish is for Jupiter and Saturn, reddish for Mars. Venus is always silvery white, unles it’s close enough to the horizon to get filtered.
Universe Today has a remarkably low-bullshit answer to the question posed and the question I thought was posed:
Also, space agencies have a real allergy to true-color imagery. You’d think a roll of Kodachrome caused them to flunk out of high school or something.
This page may be of interest then.
To me, she mostly appears to be various shades of light brown.
“The Sun is in fact white, and its spectrum peaks in blue and green light, but it can often appear yellow, orange or red through Earth’s atmosphere due to atmospheric Rayleigh scattering, especially at sunrise and sunset.”
Well, it depends on what you’re comparing it to. Compared to Vega (which is used as the astronomical standard of a “white” star), Sol is slightly yellowish. But an Earthbound photographer will use natural sunlight as the defining standard of “white light”, and describe Vega as slightly bluish by comparison.
And space agencies usually don’t use true-color imagery, because true color is of no particular interest to them. You use whatever filters you think will be useful for getting the information you want. If there’s some particular spectral line that you think might be of interest, you use a filter for that spectral line. If there’s some sort of feature that shows up in the difference between two filters, you optimize those filters to accentuate that feature. Usually, there’s some way that you can approximately map those filters to R, G, and B, to composite them together to approximate true color, and so that’s what they do for public outreach. It won’t be completely accurate, but it’ll still make pretty pictures, which is mostly good enough for public outreach purposes.
Direct sunlight by itself is yellowish though. Illumination by direct sunlight + blue sky add up to neutral white. I think that’s why we tend to think of the Sun as yellow. You can think of it as being contrasted by the blue sky, or that some of the blue light is removed from direct sunlight and becomes diffuse sky.