Steve’s Virtual Planet

S.V.P. Star News - How far are they?

Recently, I found this article on the history of measuring distances to the stars. Accurately measuring the distances to closeby stars allows astronomers to further calibrate their models of stars. This branch of astronomy is known as astrometry.

In august of this year, this topic got a bit more interesting with a new finding of the distance to the Pleiades Cluster. I’ve also written on the general topic of the cosmic distance scale. Not only do scientists benefit from better data in general, they can more accurately judge distances of far off objects based on their measured, or apparent magnitude.

When we look at the sky, we witness the star’s light as apparent magnitude. But we can still appreciate the object itself by consulting the data that has been compiled and calculated. Space is vast and almost beyond our comprehension. These scales give us a sense of our place in the cosmos .. and our size!