Hold a pencil in front of your face and sigh over it with one eye at a distant o

Question

Hold a pencil in front of your face and sigh over it with one eye at a distant object. Move your head right and left while holding the pencil steady. The relative motion of the pencil with respect to the background is called parallax. When two objects are lined up to make a measurement, different alignments of the eye and the two objects can result in parallax errors. Find a clock or watch with hands and estimate the possible parallax error of the minute hand. Describe what you did and your results.

I'm unsure of how to determine the parallax error of the minute hand of a clock.

Explanation / Answer

A parallax error occurs when you look at something from a slight side angle, without realizing that one object is slightly in front of the other.

As an example of this, in fact the best example

when you look at a clock from the side and at straight up 12:00 if looks like it might be 11:50 or 12:05 depending on what side your are looking from.

It looks like it might be slightly off because the hands are slightly above the numbers.

Or like 3 stars when on is in front of the other 2 and you are not looking straignt on the might look like the are side by each instead of in a triangle position

or in another way :

Say you have a meter of some kind with a moving pointer and a measurement scale behind it.

Something like a speedometer in your car.

If you look at the pointer from directly in front of it you read the actual measured value.

If you are off to the right side you will read a measurement that is lower than the actual measured value.

If you are off to the left then you will read a higher value that actual.

That error is called Parallax error

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