It certainly sounds like an interesting and novel approach. Is this the first paper ever to do something like this?
This kind of isn’t my field so apologies for two likely dumb questions that came up for me. How do we know that the description isn’t written by someone with some kind of color blindness or some other kind of eye issue that impacts the description of it’s only using one source? How do we know that color descriptions aren’t impacted by human perception evolving over time?
For the second question what I mean is that I seem to recall that humans didn’t even used to have language to describe different shades that just didn’t exist so there’s an aspect of language and I wonder if the lack of access to those shades alters the actual ability for humans of different eras to recognize that color in the first place.
However, the claim the authors of this paper seem to be making is that ancient observers did perceive and distinguish different colors of stars -- as evidenced by the fact that they grouped stars in a way that largely matches modern observations -- but that Betelgeuse is a notable outlier in their observations compared to modern ones. That can't be explained by simply saying that the observers were less perceptive than we are now.
And it's not just one source, but multiple observers from different cultures whose observations corroborate one another.
This kind of isn’t my field so apologies for two likely dumb questions that came up for me. How do we know that the description isn’t written by someone with some kind of color blindness or some other kind of eye issue that impacts the description of it’s only using one source? How do we know that color descriptions aren’t impacted by human perception evolving over time?
For the second question what I mean is that I seem to recall that humans didn’t even used to have language to describe different shades that just didn’t exist so there’s an aspect of language and I wonder if the lack of access to those shades alters the actual ability for humans of different eras to recognize that color in the first place.