Stellar Parallax

Parallax is the apparent difference in the position (line of sight

to) an object, when the object is viewed from different locations.
So, when we observe that a star has apparently moved (not to
be confused with it actually having moved – proper motion),
when we look at it from two different locations on the Earth’s
orbit around the Sun (i.e. on different dates), that’s stellar
parallax! (And if the star does not seem to have moved? Well,
its parallax is zero).

Observed from Earth, the night sky appears two-dimensional.

But it's anything but. However, it took astronomers thousands
of years to figure out how to measure distances of stars from
our planet and create actual three-dimensional maps reflecting
the distribution of stars and galaxies in the universe. One of the
key methods they use is the so-called parallax, which relies on
the same effect as stereoscopic vision. 
It works like this: hold out your hand, close your right eye, and
place your extended thumb over a distant object. Now, switch
eyes, so that your left is closed and your right is open. Your
thumb will appear to shift slightly against the background. By
measuring this small change and knowing the distance
between your eyes, you can calculate the distance to your
thumb. That's trigonometry. 
When it comes to measuring distances to other stars, there are
no two eyes that could do the trick. Instead, the orbit
of Earth around the sun provides the baseline for these
calculations. 
Every six months, the planet changes its position with respect
to the surrounding universe by 186 million miles (300 million
kilometers). Since we are making this motion together with
Earth, we can (theoretically) observe its effect as tiny circles
that stars perform in the sky every year. Due to the vast
distances to even the nearest stars, these circles are barely
noticeable so detecting and measuring them is extremely
difficult. 

The furthest apart two locations on the Earth’s orbit can be is 2

au (two astronomical units), as when observations of an object
are taken six months apart. By simple trigonometry (geometry),
the distance to the object being observed is just the length of
the baseline divided by the tangent of the parallax angle (the
angular difference in the two lines of sight) … and since
parallax angles are extremely small for stars (less than one
arcsecond), the tangent of the angle is the same as the angle.
This gives a natural unit of distance for stars, the parsec …
which is the distance at which an object has a parallax of one
arcsecond when viewed from a baseline of one au.

There was a pretty hot competition, among astronomers, to be

the first to measure the parallax of a star (other than the Sun),
back in the 1830s; the race was won by Friedrich Bessell
(remember Bessell functions?), in 1838, with a measurement of
the parallax of 61 Cygni (0.314 arcsecs, in case you were
wondering; two other astronomers measured the parallax of
different stars in the same year).

To date, the most accurate parallaxes (~1 milli-arcsec) are the

100,000 or so obtained by the ESA’s Hipparcos mission (which
operated between 1989 and 1993; results published in 1997) …
Hipparcos stands
for High Precision Parallax Collecting Satellite, but is also a
nod to the ancient Greek astronomer Hipparchus. The follow-up
mission, Gaia (target launch date: 2012) will substantially
improve on this (up to a billion stars, parallaxes as small as 20
micro-arcsec).

Here’s a fun fact: Gaia will measure the gravitational deflection

caused the Sun … across the whole sky (and detect that due to
Mars, for stars near the line sight to it)
A real breakthrough in parallax measurement and therefore in
determining distances of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way,
came with a mission called Hipparchos, after the ancient Greek
astronomer that first used the method to estimate the distance
of the moon. 
This mission, launched by ESA in 1989, measured the
positions and parallaxes as well as proper motions (the motion
of a star on the sky observed over the years that is not caused
by the parallax but reflects the actual movement of the star in
space), for nearly 120,000 stars. The spacecraft orbited Earth
for about four years, allowing astronomers to probe the
neighbourhood of the sun up to the distance of 300 light-years
with the accuracy of 0.001 arcseconds.
Two decades after the end of the Hipparchos mission, another
breakthrough arrived. In 2013, ESA launched a telescope
called Gaia that charts the positions, parallaxes, and proper
motions of more than one billion stars. That number represents
only about 1% of the actual number of stars in the galaxy, but
that's enough for astronomers to extrapolate the observations
to understand how the Milky Way behaves as a whole. 
Using Gaia data, they could, for the first time, create a dynamic
movie of the galaxy's life over billions of years, uncovering past
events but also projecting what will happen in the future.
"Hipparcos had a detector with only one pixel and could only
observe one star at a time," said de Bruijne, who is ESA's
deputy project scientist for the Gaia mission. "Gaia, on the
other hand, has nearly a billion pixels in its detectors and can
observe thousands of stars at the same time."
Gaia’s mirrors are 20 times larger and therefore it collects light
much more efficiently than its predecessor, seeing much
deeper into the galaxy.
The parallax method, however, is only the first rung on the
cosmic distance ladder, a succession of methods that
astronomers use to estimate distances of objects in the
universe. At some point, stars and galaxies get too distant to
have their parallax measured even by the most sensitive of
available technologies. But astronomers can use insights
derived from the parallax measurements of the closer stars to
estimate distances of those more distant. 
For example, by measuring the distances to a number of
nearby stars, astronomers have been able to establish
relationships between a star’s color and its intrinsic brightness,
the brightness it would appear to have if viewed from a
standard distance. These stars then become what astronomers
call "standard candles." By comparing the color and spectrum
of stars to the "standard candles", astronomers can determine
the star's intrinsic brightness, said Mark Reid, an astronomer at
the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. 
By comparing the intrinsic brightness to the star's apparent
brightness, we can get a good measure of the star's distance
by applying the 1/r^2 rule. The 1/r^2 rule states that the
apparent brightness of a light source is proportional to the
square of its distance. For example, if you project a one-foot
square image onto a screen, and then move the projector twice
as far away, the new image will be 2 feet by 2 feet, or 4 square
feet. The light is spread over an area four times larger, and it
will be only one-fourth as bright as when the projector was half
as far away. If you move the projector three times farther away,
the light will cover 9 square feet and appear only one-ninth as
bright.  
If a star measured in this manner happens to be part of a
distant cluster, we can assume that all of those stars are the
same distance, and we can add them to the library of standard
candles. 
Another application of parallax is the reproduction and display
of 3D images. The key is to capture 2D images of the subject
from two slightly different angles, similar to the way human eyes
do, and present them in such a way that each eye sees only
one of the two images. 
For example, a stereopticon, or stereoscope, which was a
popular device in the 19th century, uses parallax to display
photographs in 3D. Two pictures mounted next to each other
are viewed through a set of lenses. Each picture is taken from a
slightly different viewpoint that corresponds closely to the
spacing of the eyes. The left picture represents what the left
eye would see, and the right picture shows what the right eye
would see. Through a special viewer, the pair of 2D pictures
merge into a single 3D photograph. The modern View-Master
toy uses the same principle.
Another method for capturing and viewing 3D images, Anaglyph
3D, separates images by photographing them through colored
filters. The images are then viewed using special colored
glasses. One lens is usually red and the other cyan (blue-
green). This effect works for movies and printed images, but
most or all of the color information from the original scene is
lost. 
Some movies achieve a 3D effect using polarized light. The two
images are polarized in orthogonal directions, or at right angles
to each other, typically in an X pattern, and projected together
on the screen. The special 3D glasses worn by audience
members block one of the two overlaid images to each eye. 
Most of today’s 3D televisions use an active-shutter scheme to
display images for each eye that alternate at 240 Hz. Special
glasses are synchronized with the TV so they alternately block
the left and right images to each eye. 
Virtual reality gaming headsets, such as the Oculus Rift and
the HTC Vive, produce 3D virtual environments by projecting an
image from a different viewing angle to each eye to simulate a
parallax effect. 
There are also many uses for 3D imaging in science and
medicine. For example, CT scans — which are actual 3D images
of regions inside the body, not just a pair of 2D projections —
can be displayed so each eye sees the image from a slightly
different angle to produce a parallax effect. The image can then
be rotated and tilted as it is being viewed. Scientists can also
use 3D images to visualize molecules, viruses, crystals, thin
film surfaces, nanostructures, and other objects that cannot be
seen directly with optical microscopes because they are too
small or are imbedded in opaque materials.

Parallax is the observed displacement of an object caused by

the change of the observer's point of view. In astronomy, it is an
irreplaceable tool for calculating distances of far away stars.

An example of the parallax of an object against a distant

background due to a change in location. When viewed from
"Viewpoint A", the object appears to be in front of the blue
square. When the viewpoint is changed to "Viewpoint B", the
object appears to have moved in front of the red square.
 Parallax

Astronomers derive distances to the nearest stars (closer than about 100 light-
years) by a method called stellar parallax. This method that relies on no
assumptions other than the geometry of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. You are
probably familiar with the phenomenon known as parallax. Try this. Hold out your
thumb at arm's length, close one of your eyes, and examine the relative position of
your thumb against other distant (background) objects, such as a window, wall, or
tree. Now look at your thumb with your other eye. What do you notice? Move your
thumb closer to your face and repeat the experiment. What was different this time?
This is a demonstration of the parallax effect: the apparent shift in position of a
relatively nearby object against more distant ones when viewed from different
vantage points.

Now consider that the Earth moves in its orbit around the Sun, allowing us to look
at nearby stars from slightly different locations - just like your two eyes are at
slightly different locations. This is shown in the image below.
From the image above, you can see that by knowing the size of Earth's orbit and
measuring the angles of the light from the star at two points in the orbit, the
distance to the star can be derived. The farther the star is, the smaller the angles.
For stars more than about 100 light-years from Earth, we cannot measure any shift
and the method fails.

The mathematical formula of a parallax distance is:

The Hipparcos satellite, which makes its measurements from

Earth orbit, measured the parallax distances to about 120,000
stars with an accuracy of 0.001 arc seconds, and about 2.5
million stars with a lesser degree of accuracy. This gives
accurate distances to stars out to several hundred light-years.
This illustration shows the shift in a star's position with respect
to the distant stellar background between two observations that
are separated by six months – for example, the first one in
January and the second one in July. The extent of the parallax
has been exaggerated for illustration purposes.

Even for the stars that are closest to Earth, the annual shift due
to parallax is extremely small, requiring high-precision
instruments. The first stellar parallaxes, for a handful of stars,
were measured by Friedrich Bessel, Wilhelm Struve and
Thomas Henderson in the late 1830s. In more recent times,
parallaxes for over 100 000 stars have been measured, and
ESA's Gaia mission will measure them for more than a billion
stars.
Parallax angles of less than 0.01 arc sec are very difficult
to measure from Earth because of the effects of the
Earth's atmosphere.
Generally the parallax shift for stars are very very small.
thus we have to wait for six months for earth to rotate a
significant distance in its orbit allowing us to have the
parallax shift in our measurable range.