Travelling on Planet Earth.

DAILY SPIN: THE SUN REMAINS THE SAME
[double play of words: the first affectionately parodying a newspaper, while the second paraphrases Led Zeppelin’s album, The Song Remains the Same]

If you watch another planet or two (good sight of Jupiter and Saturn in the southern sky with the moon again last night) through a window you can see our movement: as the planets seem to slowly travel across the window before leaving sight.

Earth’s spin is the same reason for our daily view of the sun. The sun remains the same through time though, as we orbit it,

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The other planets are also orbiting it, so their positions in ‘our night sky’ change. We are on the ‘inside lane’ of Jupiter and Saturn, so will race ahead soon, and they won’t be in our ‘outside lane’ vison.

Our daily/nightly sight of the moon is different, because it orbits us.

End of Days

Leaving days, we leave our planet’s spin influence.

The seasons are not because of our planet’s spin. They are because of our Earth’s rigid 23.4 axis tilt, which means that as we orbit the sun over the course of our year, each north-south hemisphere has half a year pointing towards the sun and then space, or just out to space.

Our planet’s spin still gives both hemispheres day and night, although there is more/less depending on where we are in the orbit (year). Now, the northern hemisphere is pointing more and more to space, so we will have more and more darkness; the southern is pointing more and more towards the sun, so it will have more light.

I hope the above combination of artistic imagination and writing explanation can be useful to your enjoyment of the night sky. I’ve been passively learning about it all my life, but my writing and researching over the last fifteen years made me more active. The planetstoday and timeanddate websites have recently been very useful in giving me a clear image of our solar system and its timings.

The above is the kind of knowledge I wanted 11 years ago when I started this website. That it has taken this long shows that you can’t rush these kinds of things, and knowledge is not always available; or not available in the style you need. In another 11 years we will know much more, and one day we may know how our universe works the way we today know how our solar system does.