I know our sun isn’t particularly bright or large as stars go , but I was wondering about the color and such at a brightness of mag 1.5-2, would it be a pretty generic white star or something else?
In other words, if you were at the appropriate distance from the Sun that it would appear about magnitude 1.5, would the color be noticeable? Probably. There are other stars with brightness in that range which show noticable color. On the other hand, though, the Sun isn’t nearly as yellow as most folks think: Remember, the Moon shines with reflected sunlight, and the Moon doesn’t have much color of its own, so moonlight is about the same true color as sunlight. Mostly, the Sun seems yellow to us because we’re always comparing it to a blue sky.
Other than color, you really wouldn’t be able to notice anything interesting. Magnitude 1.5 or2 is well past the point where you’d see any sort of disk, so it’d just be a point of light, like any star. Some stars show variation visible to the naked eye, but ol’ Sol doesn’t do that, either. With a good telescope and photometer, you might be able to track slight brightness changes due to sunspots, and you might even be able to some extent to model the sunspots moving across the surface of the Sun. A spectrometer would tell you that the Sun has a metallicity on the high end of normal, and if you were in the plane of the orbit, you could probably tell when Jupiter was eclipsing a small spot of the Sun. Other than that, though, I can’t think of anything else you could tell even with modern instruments.
See here to start:
The Sun’s absolute magnitude is 4.8, which is the brightness it would have at a distance of 10 parsecs (about 32.6 light years).
For the Sun to have a brightness of 1.5-2, you would have to be closer to it than 10 parsecs. It would appear to be an average whitish type star.
According to the equations here (and assuming I did the math correctly), for the Sun to have an apparent magnitude of 1.5, you would have to be 2.2 parsecs (7.0 light years) away.
For the Sun to have an apparent magnitude of 2.0, you would have to be 2.7 parsecs (8.9 light years) away.
well, tell the truth I just pulled the mags out of my ass, I just wanted to be far enough away that it wouldn’t be one of the brightest to see if it would have color or shifts to see.