Brightness

While the southern part of Sweden have had snowstorm, the northern part have been blessed with freezing temperatures of minus 25 and a clear sky of stars and northern lights.

When you look up at the sky you can see that the brightness of the stars is different. Early as 150 b.c there was a Greek astronomer called Hipparchus who created a magnitude scale to gradate the brightness of the stars. Number one (1) symbolized the brightest stars on the sky while number six (6) symbolized those barely visible. Number two to four were stars in between. Refined, this system is still used today. But today, number one, on the newer scale, is 100 times brighter than a star with number six. Since the instruments are more accurate, the astronomers now days use two decimals to describe the magnitude of the stars. Also, for stars that are not visible for the naked eye, fainter than magnitude 6, the scale has been extended. Same goes for the other way, stars that are brighter are described with negative values.

One of the brightest visible stars on the sky is Canis Majoris, also known as Sirius. Sirius has a magnitude of -1.5 and can be found in the constellation Canis Major.