It’s easy to tell that all stars are not the same brightness – some stars are brighter, while others are dimmer. We can often use how bright the star appears to us (it’s apparent luminosity) to tell how far away that star is, if we know some additional information about the star (like it’s color, for instance). In this lab, you’ll get a little practice estimating stellar magnitudes for the different brightnesses of stars.
For this lab, you’ll need to print out the Estimating Stellar Magnitudes worksheet (attached below), and the monthly star chart (https://www.telescope.com/content.jsp?pageName=Mon…).
IMPORTANT – the point of this lab is NOT to look up the magnitudes of each of these stars!!! The point is for you to go outside and estimate the magnitudes of the stars, using other stars as a reference. If you look up and fill in the magnitudes of the stars simply by Googling them, you’ll get no points for this assignment! You have to actually do the lab – the numbers aren’t the important part – I can look up the numbers – the important part is you doing the estimating!
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