Simple facts I can't find?

I'm so confused. Basically I want to find the brightest star in each of these constellations:

Ursa Minor
Draco
Cassiopeia
Ursa Major

in terms of ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDE and some reference to colour using the H-R graph.

Sorry if I sound dumb but i literally can'y find anything. like I keep seeing different absolute magnitudes??

If you do find the answer, please tell me!!!

You could look at the lists of stars per constellation on wikipedia and sort by absolute magnitude
e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stars_in_Cassiopeia

This is going to be biased towards visible i.e. nearby stars

I'm really confused because there is much info. I double posted because I'm new to TSF sorry!! Didn't mean to be rude x

I need the brightest star in each constellation so from that I can use it as a reference star to estimate the surrounding stars apparent magnitude and thus calculate absolute?

I also need to use the HR to determine their colours by this reference star?

I'm a little new to astronomy

Have you been given this as an exercise?


apparent magnitude depends on absolute magnitude and distance, and the difference between distances to stars in the same constellation is huge, you need some technique to establish the distance.

it's worthwhile imo estimating the apparent magnitude of stars or even just ranking them - colour can difficult without a spectrometer but Betelgeuse (in Orion) is noticeably 'red' to the naked eye compared to Rigel in the same constellation.

chosen this as it is the coursework I can most easily do as I am good with cameras (aperture, ISO etc) so this one is good as I can snap some pictures then analyze.

I thought that if I had a reference star with apparent magnitude then I could then estimate the stars around it. then I would do M = m + 5 -5log10 d to find the absolute?? is this wrong?

whats a spectrometer? is HR not sufficient?

Oh and if i did absolute magnitudes, where can I find them for the brightest stars in the constellations? Do you know them?

If you know the absolute magnitudes of all the stars in the constellation (wikipedia), you already know the brightest one?

oh whoops! I have to have three reference stars not in these constellations i.e around them.

Any ideas???? Viewing early April, 8pm, UK?

I'm so confused.... I'm a visual understander, if you find anything tell me or a link to good images plz??

There's some free software called stellarium that's a planetarium system which will tell you what's visible from any location at any time, how variable a star is (important if you need a reference)

you could look at a online planisphere e.g. https://home.comcast.net/~erniew/astro/plani.html

The sky and telescope constellation charts http://www.iau.org/public/themes/constellations/#umi

are worth a look, they use the Bayer designations in which the stars are named after their constellation and magnitude - the brightest star in Ursa Minor is Ursa Minor α (abbreviated to UMi α), the second brightest is UMi β etc...

off the top of my head Orion should be pretty obvious for you

So helpful. Thank you so much!! Really clear answer