Stellar Parallax A nearby star's apparent movement against the background of more distant stars as the Earth revolves around the Sun is referred to as stellar parallax. This exaggerated view shows how we can see the movement of nearby stars relative to the background of much more distant stars and use that movement to calculate the distance to the nearby star. The parallax can be used to measure the distance to the few stars which are close enough to the Sun to show a measurable parallax. The distance to the star is inversely proportional to the parallax. The distance to the star in parsecs is given by The nearest star is proxima centauri, which exhibits a parallax of 0.762 arcsec, and therefore is 1.31 parsecs away. Some well-known examples of distance measurement by parallax are 61 Cygni at 1/3 of an arcsec, distance 3 parsecs, and Barnard's Star at 1.8 parsecs = 5.9 light years.   1 Parsec = 3.26163344 light year