Astronomers measure the brightness of an astronomical object as a function of direction, frequency, time and polarization. Therefore, it is very important to understand the distance-independent quantity brightness and the distance-dependent quantity flux. If you take three pictures of the Sun from Venus, Earth and Mars, you will find the same brightness across the images even though the flux was different. Brightness is an absolute measure and flux only an apparent one.

Brightness and intensity are sometimes used to mean different things: brightness is the true power emitted by the source per unit area per unit solid angle, and intensity the power per unit area per unit solid angle along the path to a detector. If there are no absorption, emission or scattering along the path, the two quantities are the same.

We will use the ray-optics approximation to define brightness and flux. Here we assume that light travels as bullets of photons along straight lines. The assumption is good only if the emitting source is much larger than the wavelength of the emitted radiation which is almost always true in astronomy.

The figure shows propagation of radiation from a source to a detector from the point of views of the source (right) and the detector (left). In this setup, the specific brightness or intensity

$$ I_\nu \equiv \frac{dE}{dt (\cos\theta\ d\sigma) d\nu d\Omega} $$

where $dP=dE/dt$ is the infinitesimal power, $(\cos\theta \ d\sigma)$ is the area projected perpendicular to the direction of propagation, $d\nu$ is the frequency interval and $d\Omega$ the solid angle. The unit of this quantity is thus W m$^{-2}$ Hz$^{-1}$ sr$^{-1}$. The word specific and the subscript $\nu$ are used to mean that the intensity is measured per unit frequency. The brightness can also be expressed as a function of wavelength:

$$ I_\lambda \equiv \frac{dP}{(\cos\theta\ d\sigma) d\lambda d\Omega} $$

where $|I_\nu\ d\nu|=|I_\lambda\ d\lambda|$ which entails

$$ \frac{I_\lambda}{I_\nu} = \left|\frac{d\nu}{d\lambda}\right| = \frac{c}{\lambda^2} = \frac{\nu^2}{c}. $$