I love my baffling, backward, counterintuitive, overly complicated magnitudes

• Christopher Sirola ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Southern Mississippi

     University of Southern Mississippi

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: The Physics Teacher, ISSN 0031-921X, Vol. 55, Nº. 2, 2017, págs. 124-125
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • All professions have their jargon. But astronomy goes the extra parsec. Here’s an example. Vega, one of the brighter stars in the night sky, has an apparent magnitude (i.e., an apparent brightness) of approximately zero. Polaris, the North Star, has an apparent magnitude of about +2. Despite this, Vega appears brighter than Polaris, and not by two, but by a factor of about six times.