Turbulence in the atmosphere causes the “twinkling” or seeing. Moving pockets of hotter and colder air act like lenses that are projecting the star’s light into varying directions, so a varying amount of light reaches your eye. Together with the dispersion this produces a colorful twinkling.

The color of a star is linked to its surface temperature. The hotter the star, the shorter the wavelength of light it will emit. The hottest ones are blue or blue-white, which are shorter wavelengths of light. Cooler ones are red or red-brown, which are longer wavelengths.

When you look into the night sky, you may notice that the stars flicker or twinkle; their light does not appear to be constant. Instead, the Earth’s atmosphere bends the light from stars as it travels to your eyes. This causes the sensation of twinkling.

Do satellites blink red and blue? Satellites glow and do not flicker, blink or twinkle. Satellites can not possibly glow red and blue since the sunlight that falls on them is a bright white light. The same white light from the sun gets reflected towards the Earth by these flying satellites.

Tonight – or any autumn or winter evening – if you can see the Big Dipper, use two of its bowl stars to find the bright golden star Capella in the constellation Auriga the Charioteer.

These pockets are like lenses and bend the stars light rays so the star appears to move about, twinkle and flicker. Light from the star is made up of different colors and these colors are bent at different angles so the star appears to change colors from red to white.

Stars are different colors — white, blue, yellow, orange, and red. The color indicates the star’s temperature in its photosphere, the layer where the star emits most of its visible light.

Stars also vary in color – because they vary in temperature. Hotter stars appear blue or white, while cooler stars look orange or red. Stars at the ends of their lives are out of the main sequence. These include supergiants, red giants, and white dwarfs.

The varying in air density and temperature, in fact, mostly affect starlight, more so when the stars are low in the sky. This causes the stars to shimmer and its light appears to change colors. These effects are more noticeable for Sirius, the dog star, because Sirius is so bright. Sirius’s shimmering and color changing.

The stars’ true colors are apparent when they climb higher in the sky and above the turbulence of Earth’s atmosphere. If you have good eyesight and a dark, clear sky, you should be able to detect hints of color with the brighter stars. If you have difficulty discerning star colors with the unaided eye, try looking at these stars with binoculars.

Bottom line: If you’re in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere, a bright star twinkling with red and green flashes, low in the northeastern sky on October evenings, is probably Capella. Deborah Byrd created the EarthSky radio series in 1991 and founded EarthSky.org in 1994. Today, she serves as Editor-in-Chief of this website.

There’s a whole spectrum of star colors sparkling up there, from cool red stars to middle-range yellow stars to hot blue-white stars! In the northeastern sky at evening shines a bright star called Capella, the Little She-Goat, in the constellation Auriga.