Astronomy 102 Specials: The Observer's

Triangle
Astronomers make use of the ``Observer's Triangle'' when converting
angles to distances. In
the illustration below, the apparent size is
the angular diameter of a planet (or any object), and
if you know the
distance to the planet, then trigonometry (yes, trigonometry) tells
you the
actual linear size of the planet:

tan(alpha/2) = D/2R

where alpha is the angular size of the planet, D is its diameter, and
R is the distance from
Earth.

Now for those of you not particularly fond of trigonometry, the above
equation is probably
somewhat annoying, so just for you, I'm running a
special on astrophysical assumptions which
will simplify your life. In
general, the objects astronomers observe are much farther away than
they are big, so the Observer's Triangle is typically very skinny. An
equivalent way to say this is
that the angular size of astrophysical
objects is typically quite small.

Because of the small angles involved, we can make an approximation

which removes the need
to calculate a tangent. Consider the
illustration below, where two triangles are embedded
within a circle
whose radius is equal to the lengths of the long sides of each
triangle:
For the ``fat'' triangle, the length of the third side is
quite different from the length of the part
of the circle connecting
the two long sides of the triangle. However, for the skinny triangle,
the
length of the third side is nearly equal to the length of the arc.
For the skinny triangle, we can
calculate the length of either the arc
or the straight third side, and we'll get the same answer.
Well, the
length of the arc is pretty easy to calculate via some ratio arithmetic. We know that
the circumference, C, of a circle is just

C = 2 x pi x R

where R is the circle's radius, and that there are 360 degrees in a
circle. Now we've changed
our triangle to a pie slice, so the ratio of
the angle of our slice, alpha, to 360 degrees should be
the same as
the ratio of the length of the pie slice's arc to the entire
circumference. So,

alpha/360 degrees = D/C = D /(2 x pi x R)

or, moving the 2 x pi to the other side,

alpha/57.3 = D/R

This approximation is accurate to 1% for angles smaller than

9 degrees, and since the angular
diameter of the Moon (which has one
of the largest angular extents of any object in the sky) is
only
one-half degree, we can make use of the approximation almost always in
astronomy.

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This page is maintained by Ned Ladd,

ladd@bucknell.edu