Tuesday, November 15, 2022

🧬 Star Magnitude (Brightness) Explained

The next character we have in our story of star magnitude is Ptolemy and he was a Roman mathematician and astronomer that expanded on the work of Hipparchus.
He still retained that six range brightness classification with 1 being the brightest and 6 being the faintest.
Now we're gonna fast forward towards Galileo's time. When he looked at the night sky through his telescope he was able to see these invisible stars stars that you wouldn't normally see with the naked eye because they're just too faint.
He started labeling these invisible stars as seventh magnitude.
He continued Hipparchus magnitude scale but also expanded on it. Then we're gonna skip on over to 1856.