How Far Is Your Finger?
Your instructor will have arrayed horizontally on the blackboard a series of marks spaced $\frac{1}{2}$ foot apart and numbered 0.0, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and so on. In this part of the activity, your finger represents a nearby star, the marks on the blackboard represent distant stars, and your eyes represent the Earth at two opposite locations in its orbit around the Sun.
3. Hold your finger upright in front of your eyes about 8 inches away (roughly the width of a common sheet of paper).
(a) Close one eye. Line up your finger with one of the marks on the blackboard. Have your partner record the number of the lined-up mark. (b) Without moving your finger, sight your finger instead with the eye that had been closed. Have your partner record the number of the new lined-up mark. (c) Subtract the two mark-numbers. The answer is the parallax shift $\theta$ of your nearby finger in fictitious units we'll call "marks."