Astronomy - USA (2021-12)

14 ASTRONOMY • DECEMBER 2021

SECRET SKY

British astronomer Admiral William Henry

Smyth may have been a pioneer in applying

color science to astronomy. His 1844 Cycle of

Celestial Objects is filled with colorful descriptions of

double and multiple stars — including smalt blue,

f lushed white, orpiment yellow, dusky orange, and

cherry red. While most of the star colors he perceived

(sans adjectives) were among those considered most

distinct to visual astronomers (blue, yellow, orange, and

red), Smyth also saw among the stars his share of violet

— a color beyond the blue end of the spectrum. But the

reason he saw them may be more than just simple

physics.

Violet is a color hard to find not only in nature but

also, historically, in art. That’s the conclusion reached

by Russian American artist and cognitive scientist

Allen Tager, who, over the course of 20 years, visited

193 museums in 42 countries and examined nearly

140,000 works of art to see how many incorporated the

color violet. As he wrote in a June 23 article for Psyche,

Tager found very few paintings using violet before the

1860s, when the French Impressionists adopted the

color in earnest.

To investigate further, Tager teamed up with color

scientists Eric Kirchner of the paints company

AkzoNobel and Elena Fedorovskaya at the Rochester

Institute of Technology. They used computer algo-

rithms to analyze more than 4,000 digitized works of

art. In a paper published March 13 in the journal Color

Research & Application, they reported that prior to the

mid-19t h centur y, v iolet appeared in fewer t han 4 per-

cent of paintings. But this rate quickly rose to 37 percent

The simultaneous rise of the color violet in both astronomical observations and art is no coincidence.

‘Violettomania’ in the stars

French artist Henri-Edmond Cross’ Landscape With Stars

(circa 1905–1908) is a poetic depiction of a star-streaked sky,

reminiscent in its impressionistic forms of a Japanese painting.

ROBERT LEHMAN COLLECTION, 1975/THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

BY STEPHEN

JAMES O’MEARA

Stephen is a globe-

trotting observer who

is always looking

for the next great

celestial event.