Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from ...

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PPPPPP
The Brightest Star: Polaris—
Just Another Face in the Crowd
A few
years ago I was chatting with a friend of mine. The
night before, he claimed to have seen a bright, slowly moving
object in the sky. I realized immediately that he had seen a
man-made satellite, but his description confused me. The problem
was the way he described where it was in the sky. He said the
object was in the west, near the horizon, but he also said it was
near Polaris.
“But Polaris isn’t in the west,” I told him. “It’s in the north.
And it’s well above the horizon.”
“Oh, well, the thing I saw was near this really bright star just
after sunset,” he replied.
Aha! I thought. The bright “star” must have been the planet
Venus, which was low in the western sky at dusk at that time of
year. Venus was almost painfully bright, far brighter than any other
star in the sky, brighter even than most airplanes. He thought it
was Polaris; and when I finally figured all this out I realized I had
stumbled onto some more bad astronomy.
A lot of people think Polaris is the brightest star in the sky.
Let’s get this right off the bat: it isn’t. Polaris just barely makes it
onto the list of the top 50 brightest stars, and, as a matter of fact,
it is hard to see if you live in even moderately light-polluted skies.
Growing up in suburban Washington, D.C., I could barely see it. If
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