If your arms were made of rubber, you could stretch the pen far enough away from your eyes that the shift would become imperceptible. Your brain automatically performs such comparisons and gives you a pretty good sense of how far away things in your immediate neighbourhood are. If you play with moving the pen for a while, you will notice that the farther away you hold it, the less it seems to shift. Now hold the pen at arm’s length: the shift is less. Note how the pen seems to shift relative to objects across the room. Look at it first with one eye (closing the other) and then switch eyes. To see what we mean, take a pen and hold it a few inches in front of your face. You therefore view the world from two different vantage points, and it is this dual perspective that allows you to get a general sense of how far away objects are. As you are pleased to discover every morning when you look in the mirror, your two eyes are located some distance apart. Triangulation in SpaceĪ practical example of triangulation is your own depth perception. Even so, we can, in principle, survey distances to the stars using the same technique that a civil engineer employs to survey the distance to an inaccessible mountain or tree-the method of triangulation. 1 The nearest star, however, is hundreds of thousands of AU from Earth. As this is written in 2016, Voyager 1 is 134 AU from the Sun. For example, our Voyager 1 probe, which was launched in 1977, has now traveled farther from Earth than any other spacecraft. It is an enormous step to go from the planets to the stars.
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