Would they just see lighter or brighter areas, or would they see the aurorae in the same colors that they would see that pink, green, etc. if it was clothing, flowers, signs, etc.?
It is an interesting question, and in some senses I’m going to say no.
The colours in aurora are from emission lines from the different gasses in the atmosphere. So are reasonably spectrally pure.
The whole idea of colour is complicated, and if I were to show you a flower and you said it had the same colour as one of the aurora colours, and ask a colour blind person if they saw the same correspondence, they may well say no. But I could pick a different breed of flower, or fabric, and the answer might be yes, for both you and the colour blind person.
Our nominal sense of colour comes about by the relative mix of three values. There are an infinitude of mixtures of light of various wavelengths that we perceive as the same colour. In a very real way, everyone is colour blind, it is just a matter of degree.
Trichromaticity has us see mixtures of wavelengths in a particular way. Various forms of colour blindness has people see those same mixtures of wavelengths differently. This was used to effect in wartime when it was realised that colourblind people saw camouflage differently, and the could clearly make out things ordinary people didn’t see.
So in another, and IMHO more useful, sense, the answer is yes. If a colour blind person saw a flower and an aurora and saw the same colour, the answer is trivially yes. If you disagree with them, and say that the colours were not the same, you are not right. You are only right within your own experience, and your own mapping of wavelength intensities to a perceived colour. Like I said, we are all colour blind. Just in different ways. That there is a nominal trichromatic colour vision that is the dominant mapping is just an artefact.
Then we can add tetrachromatic vision. Not an especially useful thing in humans, but some animals see more colours and differently to us. This underlines that trichromatic colour vision isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all of colour. Some birds would regard all humans as colour blind.
We can’t really “know” what someone is seeing so much as create an image that looks the same for them.
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Here is one I’ve edited to simulate a more common form of color blindness (deuteranopia or one type of red-green color blindness). The other major type doesn’t create a different enough image to be interesting, it’s just slightly different in brightness.
If you’re interested, here’s a much less common form of color blindness (tritanopia or blue-yellow)
Color blind people will see the colors in the aurora the same way they see those colors in clothing, flowers, signs, etc. @Francis_Vaughan noted the aurora will produce colors of specific frequencies where the colors reflected by those other objects may contain a mix of frequencies, as could pictures of the aurora.
I have some form of anomalous tritanomaly where I don’t have typical perception of blue colors. Seems to be more of a frequency response thing and I tend to see blue-green mixes as totally green. You might see an aurora and say it shows a lot of blue where I’d say it looks very green instead.
What was really interesting to me, from my POV, is that, even though I’m not colorblind, my camera could pick up the colors of the aurora Friday night, but I couldn’t see them with my naked eye.
Same. We could see the “shimmering” and knew it was going on, but we couldn’t easily detect the colors. Our cameras had no issues capturing amazing colors.
I’m red-green color blind and went on a Northern Lights cruise off Norway. The one time the clouds parted enough to see a clear sky, there were ooos and ahs on deck but I couldn’t see anything but a glow similar to that right after sunset. My wife admitted she couldn’t see much either but she did get a fairly impressive picture of the aurora on her phone (which I could see).
A note: Cameras are more sensitive than eyes, especially with a bit of exposure time… but using a phone camera will also be more than enough light to seriously degrade your night vision. It’s not just the camera seeing it better; the camera can actually make you see it worse.
Thanks! The blue-yellow picture actually looks to me like some really old two-color Technicolor films I’ve seen.
I used to work with another pharmacist who had red-green color blindness, and one time at the grocery store, he asked why they had hung all gray banners from the ceiling. The rest of us told him that they were pink and silver.
FYI, there are several websites that will display images as different types of color blindness. For instance
This one lets you enter an url, good for web developers
My wife and I often have difference in what we see. She is sharp with colors me I have a hard time getting it right. Example I am sitting in a room with green walls, she tells me they are blue. I painted our old house downstairs a Apricot Blush. She tells me it is a light pink but definitely a pink, To me it is mainly white with a tinge of pink if I look closely. Also when wiring things up I have to be careful, in low light I have a problem keeping the green and blue separate.
So I would assume if I saw the Auroras my perception of the colors would be off and they would not be as bright.
Yes, good that you put it this way, as a lot of (lesser) web pages say that some humans are tetrachromats and leave the impression that such people can see as many colours as, say, birds.
The reality is that some women have a fourth kind of color receptor that overlaps almost entirely with one of the other three. And the data on whether it allows them to perceive more hues is equivocal.
Meanwhile for most birds, the four channels have little overlap and appear to be independent color channels. So if they have the subjective experience of colour, they would see a dramatically more colorful world.
Same here. If we were to go to Alaska, Canada, Iceland, &c. would the aurora look like it does in the pictures or would it just be a brighter glow?
I would have guessed that for most auroral displays, a color-blind person would have the same experience as everyone else.
I have no color-blindness that I know of, but for me the great majority of time the Northern Lights are monochromatic, even some of the most awe-inspiring displays. Many people describe them as very pale green, but to me the aurora (except during unusually intense displays) is the same color as star light. Just lots brighter and prone to move around.
Yes, some of the brightest displays have their edges tinged green, with pink on the opposite side. But for me that’s not what makes it awesome.
Even the shimmering curtains or meandering rivers of light, even when it’s a pulsing set of rays or sheets of light flashing and radiating from the zenith, the aurora still seems black-and-white to me.
The issue with any dim light source is that our cones (wavelength specific - and thus colour sensors) are not as sensitive as the rods (panchromatic sensors - thus effectively sense in black and white).
Below a threshold we just don’t see colour.
Camera sensors don’t have the equivalent of rods, they just have the equivalent of cones. So if they can detect something, they see colour. Further, camera sensors can integrate light over a longer period than our eyes, plus they can turn the gain up (which will bring the noise up as well). So they can see colours where our eyes can’t. However we can usually see in conditions where an ordinary camera can’t see anything, but only in black and white.
Given good dark adaptation our eyes are surprisingly sensitive. Plus, using the technique of averted vision, where you direct your vision so that the desired object is off the eye’s axis, and so places the object over areas where rods are more prevalent than cones, allows you to see even dimmer objects. This comes at the cost of resolution as well as colour. But is remarkably effective.
Was this in response to my question?
A lot of the time, the Northern Lights appear essentially different shades of white-green. Sure, sometimes the palette is more extensive.
So before we book a trip to Reykjavík, is there any way or location that to the naked eye the Aurora would look like it does in pictures?
When I saw the Northern Lights in Iceland, they were beautiful, shimmery and spectacular - but basically green and white. So it might depend what pictures you are looking at.
Both your question and Nyvaak’s post.