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What you are seeing with the pencil is an example of motion parallax, the apparent motion of an object against a distant background due to motion of the observer. Astronomers can use motion parallax to measure the distance to stars that are relatively close to earth.
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www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_id...
www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/project_ideas/Astro_p019.shtml
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If a star is further away than that, its parallax angle p is too small to measure and you have to use more indirect methods to determine its distance. Stars are about a parsec apart from each other on average, so the method of trigonometric parallax works for just a few thousand nearby stars.
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www.astronomynotes.com/starprop/s2.htm
www.astronomynotes.com/starprop/s2.htm
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A. TRIGONOMETRIC PARALLAX ... Another method can be used to measure the average distance to a set of stars, chosen to be all about the same ... When a galaxy is too distant to allow the detection of individual stars, one can still estimate the distance using the statistical fluctuation in the number of stars in a pixel.
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www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/distance.htm
www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/distance.htm
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In applications (notably astronomy) where parallax is used to measure the distance to a distant object, the parallactic shift is usually less than 1°. If q p is measured in seconds of arc, show that r is ... 2. Referring to Figure 4 and using your result for the distance to the expansion joint, ... (For an additional 8 STARS,
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www.city.waltham.ma.us/phy2web/ProJects/PJ_Parallax.htm
www.city.waltham.ma.us/phy2web/ProJects/PJ_Parallax.htm
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How does this help astronomers measure the distance to nearby stars? Well, the Earth orbits around the Sun once a year. Since the Earth is about R = 1.5 x 10^(11) meters away from the Sun, the total baseline distance by ... European astronomers designed a satellite specifically to measure the parallax of nearby stars.
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spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys240/lectures/parallax/paralla...
spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys240/lectures/parallax/parallax.html
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The apparent position of nearby stars against the background of far-away stars changes as the Earth goes in its orbit around the Sun: ... In this picture we measure the parallax p, we know the size of 1 AU, so we can compute the distance d to the star.
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zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Stars/parallax_ly.html
zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/Stars/parallax_ly.html
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"In the whole of sidereal astronomy there is, perhaps, nothing more difficult to determine than the parallax of a star. To think that among all the stars in the sky there is not one which shows a parallax of one second! ... DISTANCE BEGETS STARS ... Using the estimated distance, he has estimated the galaxy's size.
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www.copernican-series.com/sss/parallax.html
www.copernican-series.com/sss/parallax.html
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By observing the distance of the shift and knowing the diameter of the Earth's orbit, ... The smaller the parallax shift, the farther away from earth the star is. This method is only accurate for stars within a few hundred light-years of Earth. When the stars are very far away, the parallax shift is too small to measure.
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www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/kids_space/star_dist.ht...
www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/kids_space/star_dist.html
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Goals: to discuss the theory and practice of using parallax to find the distances to nearby stars, and use it to measure the distance to objects in the classroom...
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astronomy.nmsu.edu/astr110/a110labs/labmanual/node9.htm...
astronomy.nmsu.edu/astr110/a110labs/labmanual/node9.html
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