The Distance Scale of the Universe

The methods of finding distances, the one that's easiest to think of is basically surveying techniques. Parallax is an easy concept, because as Earth goes around the sun, we get different orientations of looking at stars. How much it looks like the star moves over the course of the year is a measure of the distance. The next method out is the most simple: sepphied variables. They change their brightness intrinsically. And so what you can do is, you can see how bright that star looks to us from Earth.