Depth Perception

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

3-1-2017

Department

Physics and Astronomy

School

Mathematics and Natural Sciences

Abstract

In most disciplines, finding the distance from one object to the next is, at least in theory, a simple operation. Not so in astronomy. While the size of Earth itself was determined with a fair degree of accuracy in ancient times, the scale of the solar system wasn’t fully understood until just a few centuries ago, and the distances to even the closest of stars wasn’t reliably determined until Friedrich Bessel measured the distance to 61 Cygni in 1838.

Publication Title

Physics Teacher

Volume

55

Issue

3

First Page

188

Last Page

189

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