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Sky brightness refers to the visual perception of the sky and how it scatters and diffuses light. The fact that the sky is not completely dark at night is easily visible. If light sources (e.g. the Moon and light pollution ) were removed from the night sky , only direct starlight would be visible.
Starlight overcast moonless night sky [1] 140 microlux: Venus at brightest [1] 200 microlux: Starlight clear moonless night sky excluding airglow [1] 10 −3: 1 millilux: 2 millilux: Starlight clear moonless night sky including airglow [1] 10 −2: 1 centilux: 1 centilux: Quarter Moon 10 −1: 1 decilux: 2.5 decilux: Full Moon on a clear night ...
Stars that have magnitudes between 1.5 and 2.5 are called second-magnitude; there are some 20 stars brighter than 1.5, which are first-magnitude stars (see the list of brightest stars). For example, Sirius is magnitude −1.46, Arcturus is −0.04, Aldebaran is 0.85, Spica is 1.04, and Procyon is 0.34.
The Greek astronomer Hipparchus established a numerical scale to describe the brightness of each star appearing in the sky. The brightest stars in the sky were assigned an apparent magnitude m = 1, and the dimmest stars visible to the naked eye are assigned m = 6. [7] The difference between them corresponds to a factor of 100 in brightness.
The scale used to indicate magnitude originates in the Hellenistic practice of dividing stars visible to the naked eye into six magnitudes. The brightest stars in the night sky were said to be of first magnitude (m = 1), whereas the faintest were of sixth magnitude (m = 6), which is the limit of human visual perception (without the aid of a ...
These ratios are often reported [why?] using the value calculated for the Sun as a baseline ratio which is a constant ϒ ☉ = 5133 kg/W: equal to the solar mass M ☉ divided by the solar luminosity L ☉, M ☉ / L ☉ .
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Rayleigh scattering of sunlight in Earth's atmosphere causes diffuse sky radiation, which is the reason for the blue color of the daytime and twilight sky, as well as the yellowish to reddish hue of the low Sun. Sunlight is also subject to Raman scattering, which changes the rotational state of the molecules and gives rise to polarization ...