File:Magnitude_illustration.svg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
magnitude
Sign in to savelogarithmic measure of the brightness of an astronomical object
Wikidata facts
- Subclass of
- logarithmic scale
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- Commons category
- Magnitude (astronomy)
- maintained by WikiProject
- WikiProject Mathematics
- inception
- 0129-00-00
- on focus list of Wikimedia project
- Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/4
via Wikidata · CC0
~17 min read
Encyclopedic overview
An illustration of light sources from magnitude 1 to 3.5, in 0.5 increments In astronomy, magnitude is a measure of the brightness of an object, usually in a defined passband. An imprecise but systematic determination of the magnitude of objects was introduced in ancient times by Hipparchus.
Magnitude values do not have a unit. The scale is logarithmic and defined such that a magnitude 1 star is exactly 100 times brighter than a magnitude 6 star. Thus each step of one magnitude is
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “magnitude” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.