The scale was also extended to even brighter celestial bodies such as Sirius (-1.5), Venus (-4), the full Moon (-12.7), and the Sun (-26.7).
[3] During a series of lectures given in 1736 at the University of Oxford, its then Professor of Astronomy explainedː[4] The fixed Stars appear to be of different bignesses, not because they really are so, but because they are not all equally distant from us.
Those that are nearest will excel in Lustre and Bigness; the more remote Stars will give a fainter Light, and appear smaller to the Eye.
But on the seasonal evening sky, they are unevenly distributed: In Europe and USA 12–13 stars are visible in winter, but only 6–7 in summer.
Beside stars there are also deep-sky objects that are first-magnitude objects, accumulatively brighter than +1.50, such as the Large Magellanic Cloud, Milky Way, Carina Nebula, Hyades, Pleiades and the Alpha Persei Cluster (with Eta Carinae, Theta Tauri, Alcyone and Mirfak as the brightest stars of the latter four).