Astronomy › Section L · Analysing starlight and the stellar census › Topic L.1
The brightness of stars
Some stars look brilliant because they are powerful, others only because they are close. Separating a star's true output from the light that happens to reach us, and learning the astronomers' backwards magnitude scale, is the first step in decoding starlight.
In this topic
- Two kinds of brightness
- Luminosity: a star's true power output
- Apparent brightness and the inverse-square law
- Worked example: sunlight at Earth and at Mars
- The magnitude scale
- The magnitude equation
- Magnitudes of familiar objects
- Worked example: the Sun against the full Moon
- Absolute magnitude
- Worked example: from apparent to absolute magnitude
- Common mistakes to avoid
- Key takeaways
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