Is the sun appears reddish orangish in satellite photos, why does light appear as a whitish yellowish color? Shouldn't it be the same color as it appears in satellite photos?
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in this case I think there's no need to add one of the "reddish orang sun" images to your question, there's one in my answer and more in several of the links therein. – uhoh Sep 14 '19 at 23:56
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1The sun is actually green. Its emission peaks in the green. Just a thing to ponder. – AtmosphericPrisonEscape Sep 15 '19 at 00:38
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@AtmosphericPrisonEscape If if that's where there is a bump in the spectrum, physically, sunlight is what our eyes evolved in and hence the informationless background and so physiologicaly "by definition" white. – Hagen von Eitzen Sep 15 '19 at 10:33
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1@AtmosphericPrisonEscape - That's a nice lie to children. The truth is that the answer to the question, "Where is the sun's output a maximum?" is, without much exaggeration, "Wherever you would like it to be: just pick whether you want to measure output as energy or numbers of photons and pick an appropriate spectral variable.". Depending on which definition one chooses, where the Sun's output is at its peak is somewhere between the near infrared and green. – David Hammen Sep 15 '19 at 15:08
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@DavidHammen: Plotting $\nu F_{\nu}=\lambda F_{\lambda}$ is what astronomers do, and it's quite unanimous. It's quite rude to presume to 'lie to children' by someone who's clearly not an astronomer. – AtmosphericPrisonEscape Sep 15 '19 at 15:18
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@AtmosphericPrisonEscape - It's you who have received and retold a lie to children. The picture is more complex than that. – David Hammen Sep 15 '19 at 15:21
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@DavidHammen: It's you and your engineering website completely missing the point. I'm not trying to make any statement about evolution. Try the argument on the website you've linked, and plot $\nu F_{\nu}$ vs. $\lambda F_{\lambda}$, oh enlightened one. Hint: Try and compute the units of those quantities. – AtmosphericPrisonEscape Sep 15 '19 at 22:02
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wait, did I just become a child? – caleb lee Sep 16 '19 at 00:56
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Those orange sun photos are false color images. The images are constructed from one or more monochrome images, and flase color is added later.
Another example of a false color image triggering a question here is Is the “Mars blue dune” actually blue? And what makes it so? which now has seven answers!
The concept of white point is a rabbit hole of complexity and nuance, but sunilight is definitely considered fairly close to "white", whatever that means.
If you want to add a link to one or more of those "reddish orangish in satellite photos" you've been seeing, then your question might be more accurately answered with a link to the specific false-color description for those photos. See for example the SOHO images in What's the rationale behind the false colours in solar observation photographs?
Another example, the images in Is this really an image of the sun, or an “artist's conception”? and its answers are real, but the coloring is still false. They are taken through very narrow filters, and each image is monochrome. They are reassembled on Earth and artificial color is added, though no artificial flavoring.
Source: Phys.org's What the 'weather' is like on a star can help in the search for life
uhoh
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1I've nominated the question https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/23461/whats-the-rationale-behind-the-false-colours-in-solar-observation-photographs for reopening. – David Hammen Sep 15 '19 at 15:54
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@DavidHammen that crossed my mind as well when I linked to it, good idea! – uhoh Sep 16 '19 at 01:34