Distances: Crash Course Astronomy #25

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How do astronomers make sense of the vastness of space? How do they study things so far away? Today Phil talks about distances, going back to early astronomy. Ancient Greeks were able to find the size of the Earth and from that the distance to and the sizes of the Moon and Sun. Once the Earth/Sun distance was found, parallax was used to find the distance to nearby stars, and that was bootstrapped using brightness to determine the distances to much farther stars. Check out the Crash Course Astronomy solar system poster here: http://store.dftba.com/products/crashcourse-astronomy-poster -- Chapters: Introduction 00:00 How did we calculate the Earth's Size? 1:07 THE Astronomical Unit (AU) = 149,597,870.7 km 3:12 Depth Perception & Parallax 5:39 Light Years & Parsecs 7:31 Brightness Indicates Distance 9:07 Review 10:30 -- PBS Digital Studios: http://youtube.com/pbsdigitalstudios Follow Phil on Twitter: https://twitter.com/badastronomer Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet? Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/YouTubeCrashCourse Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/TheCrashCourse Tumblr - http://thecrashcourse.tumblr.com Support CrashCourse on Patreon: http://www.patreon.com/crashcourse -- PHOTOS/VIDEOS Lunar Ecplise http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/blogs/bad_astronomy/2014/04/15/lunareclipse_partial_apr142014_spica.jpg.CROP.original-original.jpg [credit: Phil Plait] Venus & Mercury [credit: Phil Plait] Venus Transit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34mXua1n_F

Published 2015-07-17 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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