• Question: why is it that the further the distance you look the fainter the colours get?

    Asked by to Kate, Kieren, Rowena, Roy on 19 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Rowena Fletcher-Wood

      Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      I was actually having this discussion the other night. The idea as we discussed it is that light reflected from an object a very long way away spreads out a bit as it gets further away and can be seen from an increasing number of places. This means there is less light intensity reaching your eye at any one place and so the colours gradually look fainter and fainter. The “colour information” kind of gets diluted!

    • Photo: Kieren Bradley

      Kieren Bradley answered on 20 Mar 2014:

      I have a feeling that what Rowena is saying is correct but I would add that I think the atmosphere that the light travels through is another factor. When things are hazy you will get a lot of other coloured light scattering from the haze and also reaching you meaning everything looks a bit whiter because you are getting the colour you are looking at and all the other colours on top. I think that in a vacuum that if you looked at a distinct colour you would see that colour but it would get dimmer but you could tell what colour it was even when it got further away. If you were looking at a mix of colours you would start reaching a “resolution limit”, your eyes can only see the difference between two different dots of a certain size and distance (tv screens use this to make it look like you are seeing a whole picture but actually it is a couple of millions dots, go up close and you’ll see a gap between the dots). When the coloured object is far enough away that you can’t tell the difference between the red bit and the blue bit, your eye will think it is actually a mix of the two colours instead.

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