I talked to the guy that developed the LaTex plugin for the equation editing bug at the bottom of each page. Hopefully resolved soon.
Do the math – if a star emits photons that reach my eye and my pupil has a surface area of Xmm^2 and the distance is Y light years and the photon stream is X/second, how many photons is that per second to emit across the entire sphere at that distance? That equates to how many atoms dropping energy levels how often and how many atoms are in a star?