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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.
Then it hopped another half light-year, and so on. For a long, long time it traveled in this jerky fashion. Eventually, moving as it did in the straightest of straight lines, its photocells reported that it neared a star which had achieved first-magnitude brightness. It paused a little longer than usual while its action-circuits shifted.
Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination running through the whole fibre of his being could have been crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that. By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers.
Aldebaran has been called "rose-red," and it would be an interesting occupation for an amateur to determine, with the aid of some proper color scale, the precise hue of this star, and of the many other stars which exhibit chromatic idiosyncrasy. Aldebaran is further interesting as being a standard first-magnitude star.
Sergeant Madden settled some things in his mind and dozed off again. When the squad ship came out of overdrive and he was awakened by the unpleasantness of breakout, he yawned. He looked on without comment as Patrolman Willis matter-of-factly performed the tricky task of determining the ecliptic while a solar system's sun was little more than a first-magnitude star.
It is a significant fact that most of the first-magnitude stars have faint companions which are not so distant as altogether to preclude the idea of physical relationship.
When Weald was a first-magnitude star, the four were not highly qualified astrogators, to be sure, but they were vastly better spacemen than at the beginning. Inevitably, their attitude toward Calhoun was respectful. He'd been irritable and right. To the young, the combination is impressive. Maril had served as passenger only.
Unless she actually was playing in support of a first-magnitude star, her dressing room was marked "A." Other members of the company did not drop into her dressing room except by invitation. That room was neat to the point of primness. A square of white coarse sheeting was spread on the floor, under the chair before her dressing table, to gather up dust and powder.
The majority of the great first-magnitude stars seem related to it, as if they formed an inner ring inclined at an angle of some twenty degrees to its plane. Many of the long curves that set off from it on both sides are accompanied by corresponding curves of lucid stars. In a word, it offers every appearance of structural connection with the entire starry system.
When seen low in the twilight, at evening or morning, it glows with the brilliance of a bright first-magnitude star, and is a beautiful object, though few casual watchers of the stars ever catch sight of it.
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