Martin,

Thanks for those details.  Makes sense now that you put it that way.  Thanks 
for sharing those details.

Phil.
K0NX




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Martin G. McCormick" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2015 11:18 AM
Subject: Re: The Colors of the Stars


> There actually are different colored stars but their
> colors come from their temperatures so they usually emit a broad
> range of colors just like our own Sun but the hotter stars have
> a peak that is higher or shorter wave-length than are the cooler
> stars. A star like our Sun is considered to be an average
> run-of-the-mill star. It is in the middle of it's life cycle so
> it has about as long to shine as it has already shown. It's
> surface temperature and the fact that we are not moving toward
> or away from it at any real speed determines what color
> Earthling see.
>
> When you heat something such as a piece of metal, it
> starts to glow reddish-orange around 1,000 or 2,000 degrees.
> Electric stove burners on high and tube filaments glow this
> color.
>
> If you raise the temperature up to around 6 or
> 7-thousand degrees, the light is more Sun-like. We would call it
> yellowish-white. If you keep heating the metal, it shines more
> blueish and eventually goes violet.
>
> Welding torches emit a lot of ultraviolet and are
> hazardous to one's eyes because of this high temperature. If you
> could keep heating things up high enough, the object you were
> heating would be sending out X-rays and gamma rays.
>
> There are stars that are huge by our Sun's standard and
> they actually shine in X-ray light because they run so hot.
> Other stars run cooler than our Sun and might look more like a
> glowing log in a dying camp fire.
>
> The smart people in astronomy say that our Sun will
> probably die one day by expanding to something called a red
> giant. It will basically cool off so that it's light is more
> red-orange and it will most likely also expand in size to eat
> our whole Solar System.
>
> Each hot object, whether or not it is a star or a light
> bulb filament emits a whole rainbow of colors but some are much
> stronger than others.
>
> What you saw with the binoculars is something called
> refraction. Lenses cause this effect because different colors of
> light are refracted at different angles so everything has a
> halo of rainbow color around it.
>
> That is one of the reasons telescopes use parabolic
> mirrors instead of lenses. Mirrors that are front-surfaced do
> not refract light but reflect it and all the colors get to your
> eye or your camera in the right place so a white star looks like
> a white point of light rather than a very pretty but inaccurate
> rainbow point.
>
> Martin
>
> Phil Scovell writes:
>> I am buying the N4PY software for my Icom 7000, which works on Kenwoods,
>