Why sun appears to be yellow and moon appears to be white even though moon mearly reflects sun light?

Answer 1

It basically is due to the energy of the light, the direct sunlight is high in the infrared range and looks to us though the atmosphere more reddish yellow, the reflected light is cooler in the infrared's and reflects the visible spectrum that we see as "white"light:

Black-body colors at temperatures around 5000-7000 K are nearly white,
It is still not known why the Sun's light is missing some colors.
The Sun emits light of nearly every color, it does indeed appear brightest in yellow-green light.
What we call visible light can be put into two categories: white light and filtered light.
White light pictures without any filter show how the sun appears to the naked eye.
The links below have some very good information on the Sun's visible light spectrum.

http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/colour/Tspectrum.html
http://www.vendian.org/mncharity/dir3/starcolor/sun.html

Yours: Grumpy

Answer 2

The Sun is considered a yellow star because its light peaks in the yellow-green, but to our eyes it's white. Sunlight contains enough light across all of the visible spectrum for it to appear white to us. You don't go out at midday and think the light looks yellowish, do you? About the only time you can actually look at the sun is when it is low in the sky. In that case, the blue light has been scattered away by the atmosphere, and the Sun looks yellow or red.

Also, our visual system tends to perform an automatic "white balance", so that any reasonably full-spectrum source looks white. If you take a picture with multiple light sources you will see that sunlight, incandescent light, and fluorescent light are different colors, but under any one of them we tend to see the light as simply white. Generally, we're aware of a light source having a color bias only if it is considerably deficient in some part of the spectrum, or if we see it in comparison with a different source.

Answer 3

Although the sun is typically drawn as being yellow in paintings and such, there is actually nothing yellow about it. Ever actually looked at the sun? (Don't). Anyway, it isn't yellow, or it would make everything it shines upon yellow too. A white piece of paper in sunlight would be yellow. Clouds would be yellow. Snow would be yellow. Oops, one example too many...

Now, if there's a hazy day and the sun is setting, it may appear yellow, but that's just tinting from hazy, yellow-ish pollution in the air, not the sun's color.

Okay, after looking at orf's answer, I'll concede that there may be, like, a 0.00001% yellowish tinge to the sun, or whatever. It's not "perfectly" white.

Answer 4

The sun is about 3K - 4K degrees F. Any star at that temp will appear yellow (as opposed to some which around 10K degrees and appear as bluish white.

The moon merely reflects sunlight back at earth, and appears white.

Answer 5

I agree with the answer already given that sunlight is white. This is easily demonstrated by passing sunlight through a prism when the seven colours are clearly seen.
The moon appears white because it reflects sunlight which is white.

Answer 6

good question but i am a genius so its easy!
Sun always looks yellow because it is star and is burning because of nuclear fusion and releases very sparky solar flares which come towards earth causes it looks yellow and after all what is the colour of fire.

on other hand moon is way cooler than sun like sun is 100000000kelvin to 15000000000 kellvin and moon is just up to 20 celcisus so that makes a lot of difference and distance does not make any difference.

Answer 7

Because the moon realy is white and the sun realy is yellow and the color dosent reflect that much if at all.

Answer 8

Because of the chemical nature of lunar landscape. It absorbs the other waveleghts and it appears white.

Answer 9

the color of the sun and the moon is just a figment of your imagination. :)