 Greetings and welcome to the Introduction to Astronomy. In this week's Misconception in Astronomy we are going to talk about the Sun and figure out what color the Sun is. So is the Sun really yellow? Let's go ahead and look at this and what we find is what is the color of the Sun? Well it really depends. We often see images such as this one of a yellow Sun. However, that's not really the case. The Sun actually emits all visible colors in roughly the same amounts. So that means everything, all the colors of the rainbow. If we actually calculate where the peak wavelength of the Sun is, we can do that based on its temperature and it will peak at 502 nanometers. That's actually in the green portion of the spectrum. So if we really want to be particular, the Sun is emitting more green light than any other type of light that we see. So green would be the peak and then things around that it would start to fade off. We'd have less in the red and less in the violet on the edges of the spectrum. However the whole combination of light that we see from the Sun is what our eyes have developed to see as white light. So if we look from space, we would see the Sun as being white. That is just our definition of white light. So our atmosphere is what affects this a bit. And we know of this if we look at the Sun at rising or setting. So let's look at an example of that here. What does our atmosphere do? The atmosphere absorbs shorter wavelengths. That's things like the blues and the greens. They get absorbed. So when the Sun is lower in the atmosphere, it is going to look very red in the sky. And we see that. We watch a sunset. What happens to the Sun? Well, we'll see a yellowish color and then it will slowly turn to an orange and then to a red. We can't actually look at the Sun and that's a good thing. We don't want to sit there and stare at the Sun when it's at its highest in the sky, going through the least atmosphere and would look the most white looking straight overhead. So we can't look at it. It's simply way too bright to be able to be looked at directly in that case. So it's effects of the atmosphere that give us the yellow Sun as that's what we can see when it gets closer to the horizon. In reality, the Sun is giving off most. It peaks in the green light, but that does not mean that it looks green. That means that it's giving off a range of wavelengths in the visible spectrum and that's just where the peak happens to fall. So let's go ahead and summarize what we've looked at here a little bit. And what we've seen is that we sometimes do consider the Sun to be a yellow star. However, the calculation will show that the Sun actually peaks in the green portion of the spectrum. What the thing is is the color is affected by that light traveling through Earth's atmosphere and above the atmosphere the Sun would appear white, a mixture of all of the colors of the rainbow. So that concludes this week's misconception in astronomy. We'll be back again next time for another misconception. So until then, have a great day everyone and I will see you in class!