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Star night light12/7/2023 ![]() ![]() So a magnitude 1.0 star is 2.512 times brighter than a magnitude 2.0 star, and so on. The magnitude scale’s multiplicative factor is about 2.512. Although this logarithmic scaling (in which each tier is a multiplicative factor fainter than the one preceding it) may be counterintuitive, it is actually quite convenient: a linear scale encompassing the enormous range of stellar brightness would require far too many tiers to be useful. Outside of astronomers, however, the magnitude scale sees little use-perhaps because it’s confusingly nonlinear! In other words, a magnitude 1.0 star is not six times brighter than a magnitude 6.0 star but rather brighter by a factor of 100. This was the true origin of the magnitude scale, which astronomers still use today. A few centuries later, another Greek astronomer, Ptolemy, attempted to classify stars using a six-tier scale, assigning the brightest stars to the first tier and the faintest ones to the sixth. The first person we know did this was Greek polymath Hipparchus, who created a star map noting the brightness of various stars more than two millennia ago. And astronomers, being scientists, decided they had to quantify it in other words, throw math at it. ![]() This varying visibility of stars is so obvious you may not have given it much thought.Īstronomers, however, think about it a lot. A handful are so bright that you can easily see them even in a big city’s washed-out sky, while others are so faint that they’re invisible unless you’re stargazing on a moonless night from an essentially light-pollution-free locale ( if you can find one). ![]() One of the most obvious things about looking at stars in the sky is that they’re not all the same brightness. ![]()
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