Starlight. The word describes the glitter of Hollywood, dance halls, playhouses and other entertainment venues. Stars of screen and stage dazzle the hours away as we watch from theater chairs or our living room sofas. Entertainment, however, has little to do with the stars in the sky.
The stars that appear over our heads as twilight turns to night shine gently and faithfully, beacons that transcend our earthly abode and life spans. Our great-great grandparents saw the same Big Dipper, the same Milky Way Band, the same Cygnus the Swan or Orion the Hunter that await our next stargazing voyage out our back door.
Fleeting, true starlight is kept back by nature’s clouds and mankind’s insistence to light up the night with neon and incandescent glow. Much of modern society thinks little of stars other than who is playing in the next movie or TV show. A far grander show is unveiled each clear night while most of us are tucked in bed (or watching a screen). Above our homes and yards, the stellar firmament shines down on this planet whether we look up or not.
Every day we bathe in starlight. Even on a cloudy day, we can see what is in the room with a window, without any light switch flipped. The diffused light of the sun passes through the clouds and lights our way. We put sun tan lotion on our skin to protect ourselves from too much ultraviolet. We lay on a beach chair in hope of a good tan. All of this is about starlight from our home star, the sun.
Stars we view at night are so vastly far away, that they seem as mere points of light, none so bright that we must cover our eyes or walk freely without a flashlight. Yet each of those stars you can see range from nearly as powerful to far surpassed in power, as our sun.
We rank starlight brightness by a scale of magnitude. The dimmest star we normally can see is of magnitude +6. If you have moderate light pollution, you may only see stars of possibly +3 or +4, or hopefully +5. The brightest stars of the Big Dipper, as well as Polaris (the North Star) are of magnitude +2. The brightest night-time stars are +1 and greater. The brilliant star Vega, seen nearly overhead on late summer evenings as seen from mid-northern latitudes, is magnitude 0.03. The brightest star of the night, Sirius (visible on winter evenings), is -1.4.
