apparent magnitude

measure of brightness for celestial objects, as seen from Earth

AI overview

Apparent magnitude is a number that measures how bright a star or other object in the sky appears to us when we look at it from Earth. It matters because it helps astronomers and stargazers compare the brightness of different celestial objects and understand what we can see in the night sky.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

~19 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Asteroid 65 Cybele and two stars in the constellation Aquarius, with their magnitudes labeled

Apparent magnitude (m) is a measure of the brightness of a star, astronomical object or other celestial objects like artificial satellites. Its value depends on its intrinsic luminosity, its distance, and any extinction of the object's light caused by interstellar dust or atmosphere along the line of sight to the observer.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “apparent magnitude” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

apparent magnitude

Encyclopedic overview

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What links here11,141 pages