What color is the sun?

Answer

an answer without formulas and difficult terminology.

the light from the sun that reaches us on a clear day is “perfect white”. When it shines on the brightest objects (such as snow, shiny metal) they appear “perfect white”. (If you shine a red lamp on snow, the snow will appear red.)

One could now say all kinds of things about the spectrum of the sun, color temperature and the like, but that does not provide a “better” answer.

Sunlight is white because we and our eyes evolved in prehistoric times on a planet that is irradiated by the sun, and are therefore most adapted to “that” light.

In fact, our eye is a very poor “white-recognizer”. Experiments with test subjects (try it yourself!) show that we still label colors that differ greatly from each other as “white”: light gray, beige, off-white, white paper illuminated by the sun or in the shade, by fluorescent lighting or by a table lamp.

It turns out that our eye (along with our brain) uses the following rule: the brightest object – or light source – in the environment, we call “white”. Unless it’s very different. That’s why we won’t call a bright red bulb white

but a bright yellow one often does.

Why does the color change when you look at the sun? First and foremost: DON’T. You damage your retina. Your damaged, burned-in or heated up retina no longer works as it should and gives wrong signals, so wrong color perception. If the damage is not too bad, normal vision will return after a short time.