KennyR wrote:
That's what I wanna do. I know a star's location in the sky by its altitude and azimuth at any point in time, and I can look up the distance from our Sun to them in the same way.
But what I want to do is compare two stars and calculate the distance between them, non-relative to Earth. I've tried using everything I know about maths, which is a lot, but apparently not enough. Google isn't helping either; the internet has a few formulae, but the only ones I could find measure the distance in radians of arc, which are only useful relative to Earth. I want the distance in parsecs or light years. If I could convert radians of arc to light years I'd be happy, but I can't.
Sperical trigonometry isn't one of the things I had to learn as a chemist (phew), so has any mathematician or astronomer or astrophysisist out there got an easy formula or method?
I'll get back to you with an answer. I studied Astophysics for my BSc, and you know, I can't bloody remember!
Perhaps you can use the Parallax method to determine the distance to each star. And then with the altitude and azimuth angles, work out the distance between them?
I'll have a think about it, and get back to you later, that's if Blobrana doesn't beat me to it :-)
