Thread: Polar astronomy
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Old March 4th 18, 11:51 AM posted to sci.astro.amateur
Gerald Kelleher
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Default Polar astronomy

Justifying other people's participation in this newsgroup is as much a waste of time as justifying my own hence the withdrawl of the previous post.

The Earth is traveling forward through space in such a way that the North and South poles are close to passing through the planet's circle of illumination thereby polar sunrise and sunset at the respective poles. Of course there will be days like today at the South pole when storms make observance of the one and only sunrise and sunset each year impossible nevertheless it draws attention to the polar day/night cycle and the surface rotation behind it -

https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/spwebcam.cfm

The conclusion is straightforward enough - if daily rotation and all its effects are subtracted, the entire surface of the Earth will turn parallel to the orbital plane as a function of the orbital motion of the Earth.

These types of insights don't come easy. It is like having scattered pieces of a puzzle that do not fit together so it sets up a period where this conceptual uneasiness is balanced by looking at all the angles involved. I would say the glimpse of a conclusion lasted about a half a second, more of a foothold than a wide sweeping understanding but then again most resolutions come this flash sort of way. Unlike the actual vs illusory loops which partition the faster and slower moving planets seen from a moving Earth and where imaging was readily available, next to nothing exists in how to isolate the planet's two day/night cycles apart and then recombine them to explain the seasons and a multitude of other effects.

I do not believe that anyone who comes to applying rotational cause to the polar day/night cycle will experience it in any less a satisfying way then I originally did hence priority is not an issue as far as I am concerned. To be fair, originality can be as exhausting as anything physical and does take its toll but that being said, as a Christian, the reward is in the intimacy of understanding itself rather than an imagined opposition I need to contend with. The current merit system wouldn't actually appreciate this but that is the way it works in Christianity, at least as it is practiced among those who wish to love creation more rather than those who want to know more about creation -

"And now hear the conclusion, Brother Leo. Above all the graces and gifts of the Holy Spirit which Christ gives to his friends is that of conquering oneself and willingly enduring sufferings, insults, humiliations, and hardships for the love of Christ. For we cannot glory in all those other marvelous gifts of God, as they are not ours but God’s, as the Apostle says: ‘What have you that you have not received?’"

http://www.swordofthespirit.net/bulwark/july2011p13.htm