Convert League (lea) to Parsec (pc) instantly.
About these units
League (lea)
The league is an old unit of distance whose length varied widely across cultures, usually somewhere between 2.4 and 5.5 kilometers. Historically, it represented the distance a person could walk in an hour. Maritime and overland leagues existed, further complicating the unit's consistency across regions. In literature—particularly in adventure writing such as Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas—the league became a poetic and evocative measure of great distances. Even when not scientifically precise, its cultural and narrative resonance helped cement its place in storytelling. Though obsolete in modern measurement, the league remains an evocative relic of pre-industrial travel, when human endurance served as a baseline for measurement.
Parsec (pc)
A parsec is equal to 3.26 light years, or approximately 3.0857 × 10¹⁶ meters. It is defined based on the method of stellar parallax, the apparent shift in a star's position caused by Earth's orbit around the Sun. Specifically, a star at a distance of one parsec exhibits a parallax angle of one arcsecond (1/3600 of a degree). Because its definition emerges directly from geometric measurement techniques, the parsec became the standard astronomical unit for professional research. Parallax-based distances are foundational to the cosmic distance ladder — the sequence of methods by which astronomers measure distances from nearby stars to the farthest galaxies. The parsec is widely used in astrophysics because calculations involving gravitational dynamics, luminosity, or galactic structure often become more intuitive in parsecs than in light years. Although less familiar to the public, it is the preferred unit in scientific publications, planetary catalogs, and distance mapping of the Milky Way.