  Publications in astrophysics are nowadays mainly published and read in
digitized formats. Astrophysical publications in both research and in popular
outreach often use colorful representations of stars to indicate various
stellar types, that is, different spectral types or effective temperatures.
Computer generated and computer displayed imagery has become an integral part
of stellar astrophysics communication. There is, however, no astrophysically
motivated standard color palette for illustrative representations of stars and
some stars are actually represented in misleading colors. We use pre-computed
PHOENIX and TLUSTY stellar model spectra and convolve them with the three
standard color matching functions for human color perception between 360$\,$nm
and 830$\,$nm. The color matching functions represent the three sets of
receptors in the eye that respond to red, green, and blue light. For a grid of
main sequence stars with effective temperatures between 2300$\,$K and
55,000$\,$K of different metallicities we present the red-blue-green and
hexadecimal color codes that can be used for digitized color representations of
stars as if seen from space. We find significant deviations between the color
codes of stars computed from stellar spectra and from a black body radiator of
the same effective temperature. We illustrate the main sequence in the color
wheel and demonstrate that there are no yellow, green, cyan, or purple stars.
Red dwarf stars (spectral types M0V - M9V) actually look orange to the human
eye. Old white dwarfs such as WD$\,$1856$+$534, host to a newly discovered
transiting giant planet candidate, occur pale orange to the human eye, not
white. Our freely available software can be used to generate color codes for
any input spectrum such as those from planets, galaxies, quasars etc.
