Definition
A color-magnitude diagram is a scattergraph of astronomical objects showing the relationship between each object’s absolute magnitude and its estimated surface temperature or between optical or perceptual proxies for these quantities.
Historical Antecedents
Humankind has always wanted to understand the bodies in the night sky, and one step to understanding them is to categorize them.
The first tool available to assign these categories was the human visual system – the unaided eye. Hipparchus (c. 190 BCE–c. 120 BCE) developed a scale for stars based on visual brightness, which eventually became quantified as stellar magnitude. The convention that dimmer stars have higher magnitude is a historical precedent that dates from Hipparchus [1]. However, whereas Hipparchus attached magnitude 1 to the brightest star within each constellation, Ptolemy (c. 140 AD) refined the system so that the brightest stars had magnitude 1 and the barely visible stars had magnitude 6 [1].
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References
Astronomical Society of South Australia: Stellar Photometry. http://www.assa.org.au/articles/stellarphotometry. Accessed 30 May 2013
Wyszecki, G., Stiles, W.S.: Color Science, 2nd edn. Wiley, New York (1982)
Hertzsprung, E.: Über die Sterne der Unterabteilung c und ac nach der Spektralklassifikation von Antonia C. Maury. Astron. Nachr. 179(4296), 373–380 (1909)
Russell, H.N.: Relations between the spectra and other characteristics of the stars. Pop. Astron. 22, 275–294 (1914)
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Wikipedia, Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertzsprung%E2%80%93Russell_diagram. Accessed 30 May 2013
Shapley, A.E.: Physical Properties of Galaxies from z = 2–4. http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5060v2. Accessed 26 Feb 2013
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Brill, M.H. (2019). Color Magnitude Diagrams. In: Shamey, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Color Science and Technology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_186-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_186-2
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Latest
Color Magnitude Diagrams- Published:
- 09 May 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_186-2
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Original
Color-Magnitude Diagrams- Published:
- 29 September 2014
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27851-8_186-1