Thread: Follow the line
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Old March 7th 19, 12:53 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Quadibloc
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Default Follow the line

On Wednesday, March 6, 2019 at 3:18:49 PM UTC-7, Gerald Kelleher wrote:
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11353


This is where celestial sphere enthusiasm and modeling gets you all - a
monstrosity that offers nothing but intellectual damnation.


That is indeed an unusual orientation for a view "from space". The Sun doesn't
bounce up and down.

So the pattern of light on the Earth is shown... with the camera being oriented in a constant direction from the viewpont of people on Earth.

While this makes a point, the page is about the "reason" for the seasons, not
merely the facts of the seasons. If there were a series of Mercator maps showing
times of sunrise and sunset for the year, the fact that the continents would be
in the same place on all of them, and the colored overprinting showing night and
twilight changes would not be remarkable.

But this *appears* to show how things look _from space_, not _on Earth_, and so
you indeed have a valid point that it can be misleading in some respects.

Instead, they should have begun with photographs where the direction of the Sun
is consistent, or even diagrams showing the Earth moving from one side of the
Sun to the other, and only then go to the rotated versions of the photos.

John Savard