Thursday 26 April 2018

Colour temperature and the Moon

Earlier in the year Simon Ingram wrote a piece in Trail magazine in which he mentioned that the colour temperature of the Moon is about 4000 Kelvins. I know that the Moon is nowhere near that hot so it led to some frantic research. It is linked to the idea of blackbody radiation and is likely to have a link to Wien's Law which links the wavelength in metres of the maximum intensity to the temperature in Kelvins: lambda max x temperature = 0.0029. The background is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature The Moon is reflecting light from the Sun but has a lower colour temperature so the reflection must be affecting the light. This is not true blackbody radiation because it is not radiation given out due to the temperature of the Moon. A lower temperature means a peak in the redder end of the spectrum which is apparently experienced as yellower light. See https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/244922/why-does-moonlight-have-a-lower-color-temperature Simon Ingram also wrote about the Purkinje Effect so I need to follow that up next.