#visual spectrum

“The shift to LED street lighting is producing more blue-light pollution – an important trend that has not been noticed by the specialized satellites that monitor nighttime lighting. That is the conclusion of researchers in the UK, who have analysed digital photographs of Earth taken by astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS). The scientists say that the shift to bluer light is having negative consequences for human health, animal behaviour and astronomy.

LEDs have been around for 60 years, but older devices operated towards the red end of the visual spectrum. In the 1990s, however, bright blue LEDs became available – winning their inventors the 2014 Nobel Prize for Physics. The ability to create bright blue LEDs quickly led to the development of white LEDs, which are becoming ubiquitous in many lighting applications.

Indeed, LED streetlights have begun to replace sodium lamps – which produce yellow light – in many European countries. As well as offering lower cost and higher energy efficiency than sodium, LEDs provide better colour rendering, which improves an observer’s recognition of illuminated objects.

Negative effects

However, researchers point out that this rollout has a darker side. Previous studies have shown that the amount of light pollution is increasing with the introduction of LEDs. Furthermore, this LED light is much bluer than sodium light and previous research shows that nighttime exposure to blue light can have negative effects on people’s circadian rhythm and sleep. There is evidence that blue light can change the behaviour of some insects and it also exacerbates the problem of light pollution on the night sky – making stars more difficult to see for both the public and astronomers.”

So in movies or art when creatures can see in different spectrums or when we view different spectums through digital technology it is either a nightvision style IR or a heavily modified reverse pallet like Predator.

This morning I thought of something new though. Being capable of seeing different parts of the spectrum likely interpret their lowest range as red and their highest range as violet, but they are just in different places. So like, where a human sees orange, a bee or whatever sees more yellow. This is also due to the TYPE of photoreceptors they have, but this post is more about the interpretation of what is seen than HOW it's perceived.

So if you modified a humans eyesight to have like, 30% more spectrum visibility, they would still interpret the colors they see as the usual ROYGBIV of the rainbow, but there would be a lot more subtle shades in between. So if you showed them something that looked like a normal rainbow to most people, they would experience it as a bunch of different shades of orange with maybe one yellow line at the beginning or a red line at the end.

Meanwhile they would be dressing in what they thought of as vivid reds or violets that we see experiencing as mostly whites and blacks.

OMG I was fangirling at this. (*ﾟｰﾟ)v you just made my dat