# What does our sun look like from a distance **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 16, 2007, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-our-sun-look-like-from-a-distance/392459 "2007-02-16T06:02:43Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![outlierrn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/outlierrn/32/3005_2.png) [@outlierrn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/outlierrn)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-our-sun-look-like-from-a-distance/392459/1 "2007-02-16T06:02:43Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 6:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-our-sun-look-like-from-a-distance/392459/2 "2007-02-16T06:45:52Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-our-sun-look-like-from-a-distance/392459/3 "2007-02-16T06:53:17Z")
See here to start: > **[Sun](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun)** > > The Sun is the star located at the centre of the Solar System. It is a massive sphere of hot plasma, heated to incandescence by nuclear fusion reactions in its core, radiating the energy from its surface mainly as visible light and infrared radiation with 10% at ultraviolet energies. It is the main source of energy for life on Earth. The Sun has been an object of veneration in many cultures and a central subject of astronomical research since antiquity. The Sun orbits the Galactic Center at... > [@](#): > > The Sun has a spectral class of G2V. “G2” means that it has a surface temperature of approximately 5,500 K, giving it a white color, which, because of atmospheric scattering, appears yellow…The “V” suffix indicates that the Sun, like most stars, is a main sequence star…There are more than 100 million G2 class stars in our galaxy. 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. ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 7:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-our-sun-look-like-from-a-distance/392459/4 "2007-02-16T07:07:10Z")
According to the equations [here](http://www.astronomynotes.com/starprop/s4.htm) (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. ---
**Author:** ![outlierrn](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/outlierrn/32/3005_2.png) [@outlierrn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/outlierrn)\ **Post date:** [February 16, 2007, 9:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-does-our-sun-look-like-from-a-distance/392459/5 "2007-02-16T09:50:18Z")
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.