See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec For the derivation of the Parsec. My only quibble with the article is that it may not be obvious that they are using the small angle approximation in the intro, i.e. sin X ~ tan X ~ X for small X, yet later on there is this mention of using the tangent function, which will confuse people without a good understanding of trig into thinking there are 2 different derivations in the article--there aren't. So you can just figure out the reciproca
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