How distant are the heavens? As part of the culmination of this year's Aerospace Education Excellence (AEX) program, the day following the summer solstice, June 22, the Timmerman Composite Squadron featured a two-hour special event with a college-level introduction to the science of astronomical measurement given by Dr. Kerry Kuehn.

It is one thing to look up these distances and take someone else's word for it; it is something else to understand for oneself how these facts are determined. So, how far away is the sun? How far is it to the moon?

Dr. Kuehn, a physicist and professor at Wisconsin Lutheran College in Milwaukee, led us first to an inductive appreciation of what all is involved in measuring these astronomical distances. Then he outlined the science and math of classical theorists such as Aristarchus (b. 330 B.C.), who measured the distance to the sun by trigonometric calculations based on the observation of the half moon, and of Hipparchus (b. 190 B.C.) who employed parallax to determine that the distance from the earth to the moon is approximately sixty times the distance from the earth's surface to its center.

Dr. Kuehn responded to questions that compared the classical calculations with modern understandings of these distances (the Greeks were remarkably accurate in their conclusions). He also explained briefly a current research project that he has engineered for the study of vortexes. His study is being funded in part by NASA because of the application of vortex theory to flight dynamics.

---