To the sun, the Earth is a tiny speck: its diameter is less than 0.01% of the Earth-sun distance.
Now only visible with the largest ground-based telescopes or from space, 1999 RQ36 currently lies about one earth-sun distance away.
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By comparison, Mercury orbits our Sun at a distance between 29 million and 43 million miles.
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It will make its closest approach to the Sun - at a distance of not much more than a million km from the Sun's surface - on 28 November.
It is currently 13.5 billion kilometres (8.4 billion miles) from the Sun, or 90 times the distance separating the Earth from the Sun.
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Because, it turns out the tilt of the Earth is more important than distance from the sun.
AU, is the distance from the sun to the earth, so the position of the dust coincides with that of the rocky planets of the earth's solar system.
In 1673 it was a shocker when Gian Domenico Cassini first measured the distance to the sun at 87 million miles (darn close to the modern measurement, 93 million miles).
The SPEs will be lower as the distance from the Sun will increase, while the GCRs will be about the same, but the length of time will be longer than any mission in history.
It seemed to him unreasonable that the earth, on the contrary, would always travel at the same speed regardless of its distance from the sun, and when he got that straightened out, he single-handedly improved the accuracy of predicted positions by an order of magnitude.
But what if you don't worship the sun or relish a long-distance move?
That, in turn, made it possible to estimate the distance and size of the sun.
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In the distance a last glimmer of sun caught the top of Pumpkin Hill where men were still out mowing the first hay crop on the Deaver farm.
In 1989, Pluto was as close to the Sun as it gets during its long year - less than 30 astronomical units (AU), or 30 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
That is only a twentieth of the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun.
From that distance, a star like the sun is visible through binoculars.
In the evening, the setting is magical as the sun sets over the Congo Mountains in the distance, and tiny lights from fishing boats flicker across the lake.
Mr. STERN: So a few weeks after the Pluto encounter when we've chosen our target, we'll fire the engines of the spacecraft, but we'll have to fly a distance something like from here to the sun or twice that far to reach these Kuiper Belt objects.
Viewed from a distance of ten light-years, the sun's side-to-side wobble due to Jupiter causes its position to change by 1.6 thousandths of an arcsecond.
China's Sun Yang has shown Phelps-esque dominance in freestyle long-distance races and is trying to add a medal in the 200 free to his expected golds in the 400 and 1, 500 freestyle races.
My guide drove like a man possessed, crashing through ditches and racing across the plains, aware of the distance we had to travel and the speed of the setting sun.
For a brief second, she imagined her body warmed by the sun and her head pillowed by the sand, while out in the distance he waved to her between surging whitecaps.
This October evening, before the sun had entirely set, a pair of headlights turned in to the driveway, some distance away by the road.
Its distance from this star is only 5% of that between the Earth and the sun.
Early this morning at Moffet Air Field in Mountain View, California, Solar Impulse finally took off on the first leg of its barnstorming tour across the US. Of course, this isn't the first time the sun-powered plane and its pilots, Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, have flown long distance, but it is the first time it's taken wing through American airspace.
Behind us, the sun showed itself for the first time, but an ominous cloud still hovered above the island in the distance.
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