if the sun produces white light that then refracts into other colors when it enters our atmosphere, why does it appear yellow in photographs from space?

Question

Explanation can be more complex, I don’t mind 🙂

In: Physics

Answer 1

The sun in space is indeed white to the naked eye.

The reason space photos are often orange or yellow is because they are -lies-.

More accurately they are false color images that often represent wavelengths of light outside the visible spectrum. Even in the visible spectrum, the cameras aren’t necessarily going to be capturing the RGB values a normal camera does because those wavelengths aren’t significant from a science standpoint. And also white is a terrible color to show details so the person making the image will generally pick a color, and culturally that tends to be a yellow or red or orange because thats how the sun looks on Earth during sunrises and sunsets

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/light-wavelengths.html