Loud Ceres Sky

Old English hlūd, making noise — borrowed metaphorically as a color word since the nineteenth century. Loud red, loud yellow: a color so saturated it announces itself without needing surrounding context. Sits in the bright-bucket extreme alongside electric and striking. Carries a slightly pejorative implication of excess.

Latin Ceres, Roman-goddess-of-grain. As a color modifier, ceres implies a dwarf-planet-and-asteroid-belt-and-grain-goddess quality, the visual register of Ceres-dwarf-planet-and-asteroid-belt hand-dwarf-planet-and-asteroid-belt-and-grain-goddess Ceres-dwarf-planet-and-asteroid-belt-and-Dawn-mission ceres-and-dwarf-planet-and-asteroid-belt surfaces under Ceres-dwarf-planet-and-asteroid-belt-and-Dawn-mission inner-asteroid-belt-and-Occator-crater dwarf-planet-light. Sits at the modifier-and-cosmic end of the grid, parallel to vesta and pallas in usage.

The blue of a clear sky at noon — produced by Rayleigh scattering, the preferential dispersion of shorter wavelengths through atmospheric molecules. Air itself is colorless; the color we see is sunlight scattered toward our eyes by every cubic kilometer above. The reference shade is mid-latitude noon under a high pressure system: a clean, slightly green-shifted blue with the luminous depth of light scattered across an entire hemisphere of air.