Drs. Antoinette and Lennox Cowie at the University of Hawaii will use observations of interstellar spectral lines to determine the distances to high velocity clouds of neutral atomic hydrogen gas. Approximately 10 percent of the Galactic sky is covered by high velocity clouds of neutral atomic hydrogen, but their origin and location has remained elusive for twenty years. No matter what their origin, they are potentially an extremely interesting phenomenon which may be important to our understanding of galaxy evolution and the energy and mass balance of the interstellar medium. The missing key to the high velocity clouds is a knowledge of their distances. The Cowies' project is aimed at determining those distances.
