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A difference of one hundredfold between the light of two stars means that they are six magnitudes apart; or, in other words, from a point in space where the sun appeared as bright as what we call a first-magnitude star, its companion, Jupiter, would have shone as a sixth-magnitude star. Many stars have companions proportionally much fainter than that.
In 1876 a temporary star appeared in the constellation Cygnus, and attained at one time the brightness of the second magnitude. Its spectrum and its behavior resembled those of its immediate predecessor. In 1885, astronomers were surprised to see a sixth-magnitude star glimmering in the midst of the hazy cloud of the great Andromeda Nebula. It soon absolutely disappeared.
They had about as long a journey before them as they had already made in going from the earth to Jupiter. The great planet soon appeared as a huge crescent, since it was between them and the sun; its moons became as fifth- and sixth-magnitude stars, and in the evening of the next day Jupiter's disk became invisible to the unaided eye.
Stern shifted his course to southwest by west, and for some minutes held it true, so that the needle hardly trembled on the compass dial. Then all at once he, too, saw the welcome signal, a tiniest pin-prick of light far on the edge of the world, no different from the sixth-magnitude stars that hung just above it on the horizon, save for its redness.
The sixth-magnitude star is about 2.5" from the primary, p. 149°, and has a very peculiar color, hard to describe. It requires careful focusing to get a satisfactory view of this star with a three-inch telescope. Use magnifying powers up to two hundred and fifty diameters. With our four-inch the star is much easier, and the five-inch shows it readily with a power of one hundred.
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