flash animation

Aristarchus

Aristarchus' experiment is shown, wherein he measured the Earth-Sun distance in terms of the Earth-Moon distance, and the student is asked why he chose to use the third-quarter moon to obtain this distance, and why his resulting distance was so much smaller than the current value.

keywords: Aristarchus, Moon, Sun, Earth, distance

swf file: ca_ancientastro_aristarchus.swf