"smallg" wrote in
:


"Joseph Lazio" wrote in message
...

Not entirely. There are a number of stars that one can see that are
more than 1000 light years away, for instance, Deneb, Alnilan, and
Wezen are among the 50 brightest stars in the sky.

Yeah, but still in our galactic neighborhood, as the galaxy itself is
probably
100K lt-yrs across, although those mentioned would be a few blocks
over so to speak.... most of the other 6,000 or so visible to a person
with good vision on a dark night on Earth are well closer.

s Some bright, massive stars can be resolved in the outer spiral arms
s of the Andromeda (...) galaxy, with large earthbound telescopes
s and photographic exposures.

s But no star other than the Sun is any more than a point, even in
s the largest telescopes....they're just too distant for more.

No, the stellar disk of a number of stars have been resolved. The
most notable is Betelgeuse, as it was first resolved by Michelson in
1920.

Well, not resolved in the traditional optical sense. The stars are too
far away for that.
Belelgeuse is a red giant
and relatively nearby. Measuring angular diameter with interferometry
(as he did) is not really "resolving." I just did a quick search for
ya. The first paragraph pretty much echoes what I wrote, and it's
a good article you might want to read. The team was able
to utilize microlensing to obtain resolved *spectra* "across the
full face of a normal star other than the sun." Here's a snip (notice
their quotation marks around 'resolve.'):

It actually is resolved. The speckle interferometry is just a way of
removing atmospheric turbulence. The HST which doesn't have a particularly
large mirror can easily resolve Betelguese as a disk.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/new...eases/1996/04/

Klazmon.