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George H, you wrote:

Mike Iso wrote,
"According to WIkipedia polaris is at "2400 Astronomical units"."

And George H commented,
"The moral of that story is-don't believe what you read in Wikipedia."

The article didn't really say that. The article had certainly been
"damaged". Someone dropped in a blurb from a NASA press release about
Polaris B in the middle of the article. It didn't say Polaris was 2400 AUs
away, but if you read it quickly and didn't detect the sudden change in the
text, you might mistake it to read that way. Maybe a better moral for the
story would be 'remember how Wikipedia works when you read articles there'.
Many of these small articles on individual stars are really quite
informative, but once in a while someone with bad editing skills jumps in...
And more rarely, there's intentional vandalism (but that's usually so
obvious that it gets repaired almost immediately).

Back to the stars and their distances (for Mike now), they're all REALLY far
away. Beyond the Moon, familiar navigational objects within the Solar System
range from 0.3 to about 11 AUs distance. Even the closest star is tens of
thousands of times farther away. Useful numbers to remember: a lightyear is
about 64,000 AUs, and a parsec is about 200,000 AUs. One parsec is actually
206,265 AUs which by a remarkable coincidence is the same as the number of
seconds of arc in one radian ;-). It's not really a coincidence! you may
learn something interesting if you work it out.

 -FER

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