Accuracy of magnitudes in pre-telescopic star catalogues

TL;DR

This study evaluates the accuracy of historical star magnitudes from ancient and pre-telescopic catalogues by converting them to a modern scale, analyzing errors, and identifying observational influences affecting magnitude estimates.

Contribution

It provides a systematic comparison of historical star magnitudes with modern data, quantifies observational biases, and offers corrected magnitudes accessible via Vizier.

Findings

Historical magnitudes relate linearly to modern values.

Color index and star position influence magnitude errors.

Corrected magnitudes show improved accuracy and are publicly available.

Abstract

Historical star magnitudes from catalogues by Ptolemy (137 AD), as-Sufi (964) and Tycho Brahe (1602/27) are converted to the Johnson V-mag scale and compared to modern day values from the HIPPARCOS catalogue. The deviations (or "errors") are tested for dependencies on three different observational influences. The relation between historical and modern magnitudes is found to be linear in all three catalogues as it had previously been shown for the Almagest data by Hearnshaw (1999). A slight dependency on the colour index (B-V) is shown throughout the data sets and as-Sufi's as well as Brahe's data also give fainter values for stars of lower culmination height (indicating extinction). In all three catalogues, a star's estimated magnitude is influenced by the brightness of its immediate surroundings. After correction for the three effects, the remaining variance within the magnitude errors can be considered as approximate accuracy of the pre-telescopic magnitude estimates. The final converted and corrected magnitudes are available via the Vizier catalogue access tool (Ochsenbein, Bauer, & Marcout, 2000).