The committee of the Carte du Ciel in 1910 adopted the following convention : That for Ao stars between magnitudes 5·5 and 6·5 the mean photographic magnitude should equal the mean Harvard visual magnitude. As a corollary, the colour index of Ao stars would then be zero.
The zero point of the photographic magnitudes of the International Polar Sequence was fixed as nearly as possible in accordance with this definition; but it was by no means certain that the magnitudes thus adopted for the few stars of the Sequence represented the zero point defined by all the Ao stars specified.