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Prior to photographic methods to determine magnitude, the brightness of celestial objects was determined by visual photometric methods.This was simply achieved with the human eye by compared the brightness of an astronomical object with other nearby objects of known or fixed magnitude: especially regarding stars, planets and other planetary objects in the Solar System, variable stars [1] and ...
Luminosity is an absolute measure of radiated electromagnetic energy per unit time, and is synonymous with the radiant power emitted by a light-emitting object. [1] [2] In astronomy, luminosity is the total amount of electromagnetic energy emitted per unit of time by a star, galaxy, or other astronomical objects. [3] [4]
Photometric measurements can be combined with the inverse-square law to determine the luminosity of an object if its distance can be determined, or its distance if its luminosity is known. Other physical properties of an object, such as its temperature or chemical composition, may also be determined via broad or narrow-band spectrophotometry.
The Sun is composed primarily of the chemical elements hydrogen and helium; they account for 74.9% and 23.8%, respectively, of the mass of the Sun in the photosphere.All heavier elements, colloquially called metals in stellar astronomy, account for less than 2% of the mass, with oxygen (roughly 1% of the Sun's mass), carbon (0.3%), neon (0.2%), and iron (0.2%) being the most abundant.
The luminosity thus obtained is known as the bolometric luminosity. Masses are often calculated from the dynamics of the virialized system or from gravitational lensing . Typical mass-to-light ratios for galaxies range from 2 to 10 ϒ ☉ while on the largest scales, the mass to light ratio of the observable universe is approximately 100 ϒ ...
Observation and measurement of starlight through telescopes is the basis for many fields of astronomy, [2] including photometry and stellar spectroscopy. [3] Hipparchus did not have a telescope or any instrument that could measure apparent brightness accurately, so he simply made estimates with his eyes.
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Port with the disembarkation of Cleopatra in Tarsus (1642), by Claude Lorrain, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Light in painting fulfills several objectives like, both plastic and aesthetic: on the one hand, it is a fundamental factor in the technical representation of the work, since its presence determines the vision of the projected image, as it affects certain values such as color, texture and ...