Physics Commons^™

Depth Perception, Christopher Sirola

Faculty Publications

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.