Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos | 
pickI picked this book up last year at my favorite used book store. I expected it to be pretty dry reading. However, it wasn‘t. I was engaged throughout.
The parallax story is one of human struggle over centuries. The idea of triangulating stellar distances has been around since the ancient Greeks. It was attacked by luminaries like Galileo, Hooke, and Hershell. Yet, it remained unsolved until the engineering and procedural issues were subdued in 1838
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