Are almost all stars in the night sky brighter than the Sun?

[snorkack]

Also:

1. HD 38858 5,97/5,01
2. Gliese 667 5,9/6,29+7,24

 

[Janus]

I've extended my graphic out to 10 parsecs. The image is a bit large to insert into the post so I'll just give the link to the full-size image:
http://home.earthlink.net/~parvey/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/starchart2.jpg

 

[Janus]

Okay, it seems that the list goes out to a distance of 48.7 light years. If we want to make this an inclusive list, we'd have to make sure that all stars up to 55.3 light years have been checked. (If any of you know of a URL where I could search, I'd be glad to research the list out to 55.3 light years).
Snorkack, in the "comments" column, the comment for 61 Cygni AB says that it is "the dimmest visible star". What exactly did you mean by that? Wouldn't the dimmest visible star be magnitude 6.0?

Doing a query on VizieR, I came up with 144 stars within the distance where the Sun would be just visible at a visible magnitude of 6. of those 144, 44-47 have absolute magnitudes larger than the Sun*. This means that of the almost 6000 stars visible in the night sky by the unaided eye, only those 44-47 are less luminous than the Sun.

* The absolute magnitude was calculated from the visual magnitude and the parallax. Since there is an margin of error for the parallax, there is also a margin of error for the absolute magnitude.

 

[wolf1728]

So, if there are only about 44 - 47 stars less luminous than the Sun (with an apparent magnitude brighter than 6), then the probability of seeing a star in the night sky that is intrinsically brighter than the Sun is greater than 99%.
Thanks to Janus for doing that research and the graphic and thanks to snorkack for researching those two lists of stars.
And thanks to everybody that helped!

 

[snorkack]

This means that of the almost 6000 stars visible in the night sky by the unaided eye,

This is a commonly quoted number; but from http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q1257.html I see a different number.
Not a reliable source, though - giving 3 under 0,0.

 

[Withertdm]

Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. (Star Trek theme plays)