>>5220923And what I'm trying to say is: you are correct in essence, but what you are expecting so see takes millions of years to be perceptible to the human eye, not thousands. On your questions:
1) As for how to determine distance to stars, it can be done with basic geometry with stars within 400 million light years simply by taking a measurement on one night and then taking another measurement 6 months later. By measurement, I mean very careful notation of relative position in the sky. For stars farther than that they have other methods, but virtually every star our eyes can see (and that the ancients could see) could be calculated with this method (see sauce).
2) No, my dad is not a freemason, just an amateur astronomer since he was kid.
sauce:
https://science.howstuffworks.com/question224.htm 