From what I understand, the only person to try this was Christian Huygens. According to De Vaucouleur's "Discovery of the Universe" 1957 ( Macmillian:NY) pg 59.
"On the basis of photometric comparisons which though rough nevertheless gave an order of magnitude, Huygens estimated that the distance of Sirius was about 27,000 that of the Sun ( from earth)". This is about 20-times too small but gave a good idea of how enormous the stellar universe was compared to the planetary one.
The basic idea, so far as I can IMAGINE it, is that in a dark room during the daytime, he punched a pinhole in a shade until the brightness of the sunlight through the pinhole was the same as the brightness of Sirius. Daylight represents the illumination of the Sun at the Earth at the distance between the Sun and the Earth. So, so long as he was standing far enough back from the pinhole that he could not resolve its size, his eye was receiving the same brightness from the pinhole as it would from Sirius which was also unresolved.
To get the distance to Sirius in units of the Earth-Sun distance, you now have to measure how far you are from the pinhole. The ratio of this distance to the pinhole diameter giving the same intensity as Sirius is then the distance to Sirius in multiples of the Earth-Sun distance....27,000.
If you use a pinhole about 1 millimeter in diameter, you have to stand 27 meters back from the screen. The angular size of the pinhole is 1/27000 of a radian which equals 206265/27000 = 8 arc seconds in diameter. Human acuity is about 60 arcseconds so Huygen's was comparing apples with apples. ( both the pinhole and Sirius were unresolved ).
This is my 'reverse engineering' of the experiment. If anyone knows otherwise please let me know so I can publish the correct story!!!