Parallax Experiment Help

[aaronmccure]

Hello everybody, 

I am a high school student trying to find some help with an experiment that may or may not work. I am trying to use Parallax to find the position of a star. My goal is to find someone in another country(the farther the better, i'm in Arizona) that can see the same target star as me. The goal would be to somehow measure the angle of the telescope while viewing the target star, compared to the angle of my telescope while viewing the target star to create a triangle that i can use the angles to calculate the distance of the star. If this isn't a viable thing to do please let me know and if you have any other experiments that I could do visually with a telescope please let me know as well.

[Knighty2112]

I think without very specialist equipment the angle of parallax observed even from two different points on the earth simultaneously would be too small to measure. You would have to take readings when the earth has moved further in its orbit around the sun to be able to make out the difference in the stars position due to parallax shifting. Clearly this cannot be something done simultaneously, but a test performed over a time period of months to get any results that could be seen, and even then only for some of the closest stars to earth.

[aaronmccure]

OK that makes sense,

I understand that usually what happens is that you take a measurement and then 6mo later you take another measurement because thats when you will be the farthest away from your first measurement. Do you think there could be a way to do it in a time span of 1-2mo? My preliminary ideas would be to pinpoint the nearby star with a laser or another telescope, leave that telescope in the exact same position for 1-2mo, and then observe the star again and compare the angles. Do you think this would still be way too small of an angle/numbers to even be feasible or could it work? It dosent by any means have to be perfect, I just need to attempt it and get something a number that could be considered somewhat close. And if this isnt feasible at all, could you think of an experiment similar to this that I could possibly attempt? It dosent have to be about parallaxes, I just need to use my telescope for an experiment.

[Craney]

The answer with parallax is to find a  closer object that will move more in terms of angle.

For example, there has recently been an asteroid that has made a close approach to Earth.  Look at 2 photos from 2 observatories separated by a few thousand miles .....  USA / Chile /Hawaii  and look at the differences on the images.  You can use the fixed star separations as a scale to help. 

 

[aaronmccure]

Will do, thanks for the help!