Rennetta Boulware, age 9, Winnsboro.

How many miles is the sun  from the earth?

The earth's path around the sun is almost, though not quite  a circle. Its orbit is an ellipse, or oval‑shape, You can draw an oval with a bit of string  two pins and a pencil. Fix the pins fairly close together and tie one end of the string to each of them. Now put the pencil in, the loop of string and pull it out as far as it will go. Let the loop guide the pencil as you draw first one side of the oval, then to the other. The pins are the two foci of the ellipse, The sun occupies one of the two foci at the center of the ellipse made by the orbit of the earth.

For this reasons the earth is not always at the same distance from the sun. In January it is some three million miles closer than in July. Several experts have estimated the average distance of the earth from the sun. One careful study shows that we are at an average, distance from the sun of 93,005,000 miles. This ie supposed to be accurate within about 10 000 miles. As you see, the yearly variation of three milllion miles makes little difference in such a long distance. In any case, light from the sun  traveling at 166,000 miles a second, takes just over eight‑minutes to reach the earth.,