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The Stellar Magnitude System

by Alan M. MacRobert

Sky & Telescope

Most ways of counting and measuring things work logically. When the thing that you're measuring
increases, the number gets bigger. When you gain weight, after all, the scale doesn't tell you a
smaller number of pounds or kilograms. But things are not so sensible in astronomy — at least not
when it comes to the brightnesses of stars.

Ancient Origins

Star magnitudes do count backward, the result of an ancient fluke that seemed like a good idea at the
time. The story begins around 129 B.C., when the Greek astronomer Hipparchus produced the first
well-known star catalog. Hipparchus ranked his stars in a simple way. He called the brightest ones
"of the first magnitude," simply meaning "the biggest." Stars not so bright he called "of the second
magnitude," or second biggest. The faintest stars he could see he called "of the sixth magnitude."
Around A.D. 140 Claudius Ptolemy copied this system in his own star list. Sometimes Ptolemy
added the words "greater" or "smaller" to distinguish between stars within a magnitude class.
Ptolemy's works remained the basic astronomy texts for the next 1,400 years, so everyone used the
system of first to sixth magnitudes. It worked just fine.

Galileo forced the first change. On turning his newly made telescopes to the sky, Galileo discovered
that stars existed that were fainter than Ptolemy's sixth magnitude. "Indeed, with the glass you will
detect below stars of the sixth magnitude such a crowd of others that escape natural sight that it is
hardly believable," he exulted in his 1610 tract Sidereus Nuncius. "The largest of these . . . we may
designate as of the seventh magnitude." Thus did a new term enter the astronomical language, and
the magnitude scale became open-ended. There could be no turning back.

As telescopes got bigger and better, astronomers kept adding more magnitudes to the bottom of the
scale. Today a pair of 50-millimeter binoculars will show stars of about 9th magnitude, a 6-inch
amateur telescope will reach to 13th magnitude, and the Hubble Space Telescope has seen objects as

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faint as 31st magnitude.

By the middle of the 19th century, astronomers realized there was a pressing need to define the entire
magnitude scale more precisely than by eyeball judgment. They had already determined that a 1st-
magnitude star shines with about 100 times the light of a 6th-magnitude star. Accordingly, in 1856
the Oxford astronomer Norman R. Pogson proposed that a difference of five magnitudes be exactly
defined as a brightness ratio of 100 to 1. This convenient rule was quickly adopted. One magnitude
thus corresponds to a brightness difference of exactly the fifth root of 100, or very close to 2.512 —
a value known as the Pogson ratio.

The Meaning of Magnitudes

This difference ...means this ratio

in magnitude... in brightness

0 1 to 1

0.1 1.1 to 1

0.2 1.2 to 1

0.3 1.3 to 1

0.4 1.4 to 1

0.5 1.6 to 1

1.0 2.5 to 1

2 6.3 to 1

3 16 to 1

4 40 to 1

5 100 to 1

10 10,000 to 1

20 100,000,000 to 1

The resulting magnitude scale is logarithmic, in neat agreement with the 1850s belief that all human
senses are logarithmic in their response to stimuli. The decibel scale for rating loudness was likewise
made logarithmic.

Alas, it's not quite so, not for brightness, sound, or anything else. Our perceptions of the world
follow power-law curves, not logarithmic ones. Thus a star of magnitude 3.0 does not in fact look
exactly halfway in brightness between 2.0 and 4.0. It looks a little fainter than that. The star that

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looks halfway between 2.0 and 4.0 will be about magnitude 2.8. The wider the magnitude gap, the
greater this discrepancy. Accordingly, Sky & Telescope's computer-drawn sky maps use star dots that
are sized according to a power-law relation.

Fifty-eight magnitudes of apparent

brightness encompass the things that
astronomers study, from the glaring Sun to
the faintest objects detected with the
Hubble Space Telescope. This range is
equivalent to a brightness ratio of some
200 billion trillion.
Sky & Telescope
But the scientific world in the 1850s was gaga for logarithms, so now they are locked into the
magnitude system as firmly as Hipparchus's backward numbering.

Now that star magnitudes were ranked on a precise mathematical scale, however ill-fitting, another
problem became unavoidable. Some "1st-magnitude" stars were a whole lot brighter than others.
Astronomers had no choice but to extend the scale out to brighter values as well as faint ones. Thus
Rigel, Capella, Arcturus, and Vega are magnitude 0, an awkward statement that sounds like they
have no brightness at all! But it was too late to start over. The magnitude scale extends farther into
negative numbers: Sirius shines at magnitude –1.5, Venus reaches –4.4, the full Moon is about –
12.5, and the Sun blazes at magnitude –26.7.

Other Colors, Other Magnitudes

By the late 19th century astronomers were using

The bandpasses of the standard UBVRI
color filters, along with the spectrum of a
photography to record the sky and measure star
brightnesses, and a new problem cropped up. Some stars
showing the same brightness to the eye showed different
brightnesses on film, and vice versa. Compared to the
eye, photographic emulsions were more sensitive to blue
light and less so to red light. Accordingly, two separate
scales were devised. Visual magnitude, or mvis,
described how a star looked to the eye. Photographic
magnitude, or mpg, referred to star images on blue-
sensitive black-and-white film. These are now
abbreviated mv and mp, respectively.

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typical blue-white star. This complication turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Sky & Telescope The difference between a star's photographic and visual
magnitude was a convenient measure of the star's color.
The difference between the two kinds of magnitude was named the "color index." Its value is
increasingly positive for yellow, orange, and red stars, and negative for blue ones.

But different photographic emulsions have different spectral responses! And people's eyes differ too.
For one thing, your eye lenses turn yellow with age; old people see the world through yellow filters.
Magnitude systems designed for different wavelength ranges had to be more clearly defined than
this.

Today, precise magnitudes are specified by what a standard photoelectric photometer sees through
standard color filters. Several photometric systems have been devised; the most familiar is called
UBV after the three filters most commonly used. U encompasses the near-ultraviolet, B is blue, and
V corresponds fairly closely to the old visual magnitude; its wide peak is in the yellow-green band,
where the eye is most sensitive.

Color index is now defined as the B magnitude minus the V magnitude. A pure white star has a B-V
of about 0.2, our yellow Sun is 0.63, orange-red Betelgeuse is 1.85, and the bluest star believed
possible is –0.4, pale blue-white.

So successful was the UBV system that it was extended redward with R and I filters to define
standard red and near-infrared magnitudes. Hence it is sometimes called UBVRI. Infrared
astronomers have carried it to still longer wavelengths, picking up alphabetically after I to define the
J, K, L, M, N, and Q bands. These were chosen to match the wavelengths of infrared "windows" in
the Earth's atmosphere — wavelengths at which water vapor does not entirely absorb starlight.

In all wavebands, the bright star Vega has been chosen (arbitrarily) to define magnitude 0.0. Since
Vega is dimmer at infrared wavelengths than in visible light, infrared magnitudes are, by definition
and quite artificially, "brighter" than their visual counterparts.

Appearance and Reality

What, then, is an object's real brightness? How much total energy is it sending to us at all
wavelengths combined, visible and invisible? The answer is called the bolometric magnitude,mbol,
because total radiation was once measured with a device called a bolometer. The bolometric
magnitude has been called the God's-eye view of an object's true luster. Astrophysicists value it as
the true measure of an object's total energy emission as seen from Earth. The bolometric correction
tells how much brighter the bolometric magnitude is than the V magnitude. Its value is always
negative, because any star or object emits at least some radiation outside the visual portion of the
electromagnetic spectrum.

Up to now we've been dealing only with apparent magnitudes — how bright things look from Earth.
We don't know how intrinsically bright an object is until we also take its distance into account. Thus
astronomers created the absolute magnitude scale. An object's absolute magnitude is simply how
bright it would appear if placed at a standard distance of 10 parsecs (32.6 light-years).

Seen from this distance, the Sun

would shine at an unimpressive visual magnitude 4.85. Rigel would blaze at a dazzling –8, nearly as
bright as the quarter Moon. The red dwarf Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the solar system,
would appear to be magnitude 15.6, the tiniest little glimmer visible in a 16-inch telescope! Knowing
absolute magnitudes makes plain how vastly diverse are the objects that we casually lump together
under the single word "star."

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Absolute magnitudes are always

written with a capital M,
apparent magnitudes with a
lower-case m. Any type of
apparent magnitude —
photographic, bolometric, or
whatever — can be converted to
an absolute magnitude.

(For comets and asteroids, a very

different "absolute magnitude" is
used. The standard here is how
bright the object would appear to
On the left-hand map of Canis Major, dot sizes indicate stars' an observer standing on the Sun
apparent magnitudes; the dots match the brightnesses of the stars if the object were one
as we see them. The right-hand version indicates the same stars' astronomical unit away.)
absolute magnitudes — how bright they would appear if they
were all placed at the same distance (32.6 light-years) from Earth. So, is the magnitude system too
Absolute magnitude is a measure of true stellar luminosity. complicated? Not at all. It has
Sky & Telescope grown and evolved to fill every
brightness-measuring need
exactly as required. Hipparcus would be thrilled.

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