A difference of one hundredfold between the light of two stars means that they are six magnitudes apart; or, in other words, from a point in space where the sun appeared as bright as what we call a first-magnitude star, its companion, Jupiter, would have shone as a sixth-magnitude star.

Many stars have companions proportionally much fainter than that.

The companion of Sirius, for instance, is at least ten thousand times less bright than its great comrade.
Looking at Jupiter in this way, it interests us not as the probable abode of intelligent life, but as a world in the making, a world, moreover, which, when it is completed--if it ever shall be after the terrestrial pattern--will dwarf our globe into insignificance.

That stupendous miracle of world-making which is dimly painted in the grand figures employed by the writers of Genesis, and the composers of other cosmogonic legends, is here actually going on before our eyes.

The telescope shows us in the cloudy face of Jupiter the moving of the spirit upon the face of the great deep.