All you ever wanted to know about Magnitudes

The Crag Nebula (Huuble)

Firstly today I’m going to bang on about Stellar Magnitudes, these range from -26.73 for the sun, to 31.5 which is the dimmest object visible by Hubble, the sun from Neptune is – 19.3, which is brighter than the full moon from the earth at -12.6. You’ve probably noticed by now that the brighter an object is then the lower is its apparent magnitude. Its not a particularly linear scale, the moon is 14 orders of magnitude dimmer than the Sun but is actually 450,000 times less bright. Venus ranges from -4.6 to -3.8 and even at its dimmest is brighter than Jupiter and Mars at their brightest at -2.9. Very occasionally, there’s a supernova which frightens everyone to death, for example the Crab Supernova of AD 1054, now the crab nebula in Taurus, which was a dazzling -6.5, which is pretty bright con (6500 light years away).

That was clear wasn’t it, and it will make my life a lot easier, now what have we got this week,

Look low in the east around 10 or 11 p.m. and you'll see the bright winter constellation Orion already on the rise. Above Orion is orange Aldebaran. Above Aldebaran is the fingertip-size Pleiades star cluster. On Friday the waning Moon will be shining to Orion's left in the middle of Gemini, as shown in the blog.

Mercury is in superior conjunction, behind the glare of the Sun.
Venus (magnitude –3.9) is sinking lower in the dawn every week. Look for it low in the east 60 to 30 minutes before sunrise.

Mars (magnitude +0.4, remember +tive means dimmer, in central Cancer rises around 11 p.m. below Castor and Pollux in the east. It's very high in the southeast before dawn.
Jupiter magnitude –2.4, shines brightly in the south at dusk and lower in the southwest later in the evening. It sets around midnight.

Saturn (magnitude +1.1, in the head of Virgo) is getting higher the east-southeast before and during dawn. More than 20° to its lower left is bright Venus.
And its my birthday in 16 days, I don’t mind what you get me as long as its expensive, if your poor, why not club together, and did you know that if you look on Google maps you can see Barbara burying her ill gotten gains from space, I won’t tell you where, until I see what I get for my birthday.

That was your nights sky for the week ending on the 2nd anniversary of King Juan Carlos I of Spain saying to Chávez, President of Venezuela, "Why don't you [just] shut up?" at the 2007 Ibero-American Summit in Santiago, Chile.