Gerald Kelleher wrote:
It seems that playing fast and loose with the English language or even
torturing it comes at a price as followers of the early 20th century
theorists have lost the capacity to put the back and forth motions of the
planets and satellites around the parent Sun or parent planet using the
normal language of motion to the left or to the right.

The rule of thumb is that a planet or a satellite, as we see it from
Earth, moves from left to right in front of the parent object and from
right to left as it travels behind it. This restores context after to
losing it to RA/Dec modelling.


Except in the Southern Hemisphere. Herodotus knew this and described it in
his account of the voyages of Phoenicians


“Libya is washed on all sides by the sea except where it joins Asia, as was
first demonstrated, so far as our knowledge goes, by the Egyptian king
Necho, who, after calling off the construction of the canal between the
Nile and the Arabian gulf, sent out a fleet manned by a Phoenician crew
with orders to sail west about and return to Egypt and the Mediterranean by
way of the Straits of Gibraltar. The Phoenicians sailed from the Arabian
gulf into the southern ocean, and every autumn put in at some convenient
spot on the Libyan coast, sowed a patch of ground, and waited for next
year's harvest. Then, having got in their grain, they put to sea again, and
after two full years rounded the Pillars of Heracles in the course of the
third, and returned to Egypt. These men made a statement which I do not
myself believe, though others may, to the effect that as they sailed on a
westerly course round the southern end of Libya, they had the sun on their
right - to northward of them. This is how Libya was first discovered by
sea.”