How do they measure star distances?
Sometimes the bright stars seem to hang just above the tree tops but the nearest star to sun, we are told, is abou4G 27 million million miles away, No one knew for sure that the stars were so very far away until 1838 when the first star was measured for distance. Even without powerful instruments it is a hard job to measure the distance of a sear, all the millions of stars in the Milky Way only a few thousands have bean measured for distance, The stars, of course, are scattered near and far with vast distances between them. Their fixed patterns do not seem to change, though we know that they are all pinwheeling around the Galaxy at fantastic speeds. Meantime one earth is orbiting the sun and wheeling with the Solar System. This heavenly hoedown makes it very difficult to pinpoint a distant star and to measure its distance from us. All job is done with a giant triangle. The base of this triangle is 2,900,000 miles long and each side reaches to the star which is being measured. Where the
