I actually fact checked this and it's true.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2023
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Shark facts aside, the fact that Polaris is a ternary system, rather than a single star has completely blown my mind.
My grandfather, in the army in the 1950s, mentioned that there was an eyesight test by having cadets look at a star and ask them how many light points they saw.
I'm not convinced it was Polaris and its partners, there might have been another star system used as the test. I learned about Polaris being a triple star system years later.
If anyone knows what star systems would had been used as an eye test... I imagine it's something that could be within our eyes limits.
Unlikely Polaris. The luminosity difference between Polaris Aa and the other two is 3 orders of magnitude. Mizar and Alcor (the doublet second from the end of the Big Dipper) has been used for centuries as a vision test. If you can see the doublet, it’s equivalent to 20/20 (or 6/6) on an eye chart.
Amazing!