If you've seen Star Wars, you may remember the term "parsec," which astronomers use as a measure of distance.
The word is a portmanteau -- a mishmash of two words: parallax+arcsecond.
One parsec is the distance a star has to be from Earth in order for its parallax (the angular distance it seems to move in the sky over 6 months) to be 1 arsecond, or 0.00028 degrees.
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