parallax; it’s still small, but in some cases is big enough to be measured. Back in the early 1800s there was an intense competition among a group of scientists to be the first to measure such stellar parallax; in 1838, the German astronomer and mathematician Friedrich Bessel won the bragging rights, successfully measuring the parallax to a star called 61 Cygni, in the constellation Cygnus. The angular difference turned out to be .000084 degrees, placing the star about 10 light-years away.
