General Astronomy/Daily Motions

Every day, the Earth turns once on its axis. At the Earth's equator, we move around the center of the Earth with speeds near a thousand kilometers per hour because of this rotation. We feel nothing, but we can see the effect of Earth's rotation. An observer on Earth sees everything in the sky appear to rotate around Earth at the rate of once per day. This motion is not apparent to an observer who steps outside for a moment, since it is so slow. For the motion to become apparent, an observer must watch the sky for a period of hours. During the day, the motion manifests itself in the movement of the Sun, which proceeds from the East in the morning towards the west in the evening. At night, the constellations move, seeming to circle about the pole.

Because the daily motion of the stars is driven by the same mechanism that drives the motion of the Sun, the stars move in almost exactly the same way that the Sun moves. Indeed, everything in the sky moves in almost exactly the same way over the course of a day. The motion of the Sun and the planets only differ at all because the planets have their own motion around the Sun along their orbits, and is noticeable from Earth.

As the Earth spins, it appears to us that the celestial sphere is spinning. It spins about the Earth's pole, so that the celestial poles appear stationary and the stars and planets seem to move in circles around the poles. Stars move at 15° an hour.

The schematic illustrates the daily motion of the celestial sphere resulting from the spin of the Earth. The Sun, Moon, planets and stars make circles around the Earth. Since the observer is tilted with respect to Earth's rotation axis, the daily motion also appears tilted. As a result, celestial objects appear to rise and set at an angle.

Looking at the diagram, we see that stars should rise roughly in the East and come up at an angle. In the Northern Hemisphere, the stars move to the south as they rise, while stars move northward in the Southern Hemisphere as they rise. To an observer standing at the equator, the axis of rotation is horizontal, and stars rise in the East perpendicular to the horizon.

Since the stars seem to rotate around the celestial pole, some of the stars very near the pole never rise or set. Certainly, Polaris never sets &mdash; it remains fixed. Only an observer very close to the equator will see any of the stars in the Little Dipper rise or set. The stars close enough to the pole never seen to rise or set are called circumpolar stars. These stars always remain above an observer's horizon. Different stars are circumpolar to different observers.

Imagine standing at the North Pole. You would see Polaris overhead with all the other stars spinning around it. In reality, you are the one who is spinning. From the North Pole, all of the motion of the stars is horizontal. Stars at the horizon skim along the horizon, never rising or setting. The stars higher in the sky also move horizontally, never moving up or down. From the poles, all visible stars are circumpolar.

At the Earth's equator, the situation is different. The celestial poles appear at the horizon on the north and south points. As stars move around the poles, they all rise and set, no matter how close to the pole they are. From here, there are no circumpolar stars. As you move from the equator to the pole, you will see gradually more and more stars become circumpolar, until on finally reaching the pole you find that all stars are circumpolar.

For centuries, the day has been the most fundamental unit of time in the calendar. Measuring the passage of days is as easy as counting sunrises or sunsets. The earliest clocks, the predecessors to the sundial, worked by tracking the daily motion of the Sun across the sky.

A sundial uses the position of the Sun to give the time. (The gnomon of a sundial can be used to find north: the shortest shadow cast by the sun (at noon) points north.) Of course, not all clocks work by measuring the Sun, although all work by measuring some reliably periodic and regular process. A wristwatch, for example, measures the oscillations of a quartz crystal. Atomic clocks use the natural period of oscillation of cesium atoms to measure time. Other systems of time are tied to the motion of the Earth, but there are a variety of ways to measure time in this way. The time measured by any particular method is not guaranteed to agree with the time measured by another, so it is sometimes necessary to convert between different "kinds" of time.

The time measured by sundials is called local solar time. The local solar time progresses according to the Sun's motion around the Earth. Since the Earth's speed in its orbit around the Sun changes slightly over the course of a year, this motion is not completely uniform. Sometimes, when the Earth is moving faster in its orbit, the solar day is shorter. Early timekeepers never noticed this slight difference, but the appearance of accurate mechanical clocks made it possible to measure the small changes in the length of the day.

To deal with this problem, astronomers invented mean solar time. The mean solar time averaged the length of the day so that each day was of the same length. This standard is up to fifteen minutes off from the true solar time, but is much more convenient for clocks that are accurate enough to see the difference. Over the course of a year, the local solar time drifts, but the two always agree after a full year has passed.

For much of history, every town in the world kept a slightly different "correct time" from every other town. Under local solar time, noon occurs at the moment the Sun passes through the observer's meridian. Two observers in different locations will observe local noon to occur at different times. This is why local solar time is called "local." This difference wasn't a problem when transportation and communication were slow, but the advance of trains and telegraphs made even a small difference between nearby towns important. To deal with this, the time zones were developed. The standard time was defined to be the time at a nearby line of longitude. For most locations, the time zone was offset by an round number of hours from the time measured at Earth's prime meridian.

For historical reasons, the prime meridian is based on the line of longitude through the observatory in Greenwich, England. That time zone is known as Greenwich Mean Time, and is often used as a standard for when one wishes to compare times without taking local time zones into account. For this reason (since it is used universally) it is also called Universal Time. This is the most commonly used form of solar time, and the most commonly used measure of time in general.

It's very natural to use the Sun as a standard of time, since the cycles of day and night are so important to life on Earth. For this reason, most people think of a day as the time it takes the Sun to move through the sky once. The apparent motion of the Sun in the sky is similar to the motion of everything else, but not exactly the same. The daily motion is driven almost entirely by the rotation of the Earth, but the Sun's motion differs from the stars' motion. This happens because the Earth is moving around the Sun. The Earth moves a little in its orbit while a it rotates and day passes. Because the Earth's position has changed, a full rotation doesn't quite bring the Sun all the way around the sky. This means that the Earth makes a little more than a full rotation over the course of a solar day.

A sidereal day is the amount of time it takes for the stars to go once around the sky, equal to 23 hours and 56 minutes. The word sidereal means "relating to the stars." The difference in length between the solar and sidereal day causes the rising and setting times of stars to change throughout the year. If the star Rigel, for example, rises at noon today, it will rise at 11:56 tomorrow. In six months, it will rise at midnight. Because the difference between solar days is tied to the orbit of the Earth, there is exactly one more sidereal day in a year than there are solar days.



A sidereal month is the period of the moon in relation to the stars; approximately 27 (1/3) days (13 degrees a day). Ancient peoples used this period to track time, as evidenced by the Big Horn Medicine Wheel in Sheridan, Wyoming.

Sidereal time is widely used in astronomy because it can be used to tell which stars will be up. At a given sidereal time, the stars in the sky will always be the same. Accurately finding the position of stars is easier than finding the position of the Sun, so measurements of the solar time are usually based indirectly on the sidereal time. Modern techniques measure time from atomic clocks, which are then tied to the motion of the Earth by measurement of the sidereal time.

A synodic month is one new moon to the next; approximately 29.5 days. This is about two days longer than the sidereal month. The reason for this is that while the Moon is orbiting the Earth, the Earth is orbiting the Sun. Therefore, the Moon has to travel more than 360 degrees to return to its original position above the same meridian on the Earth.

For anyone living on the coast, tides play an important role in everyday life. Despite this, the cause of the tides was a mystery for centuries, before gravity was well understood. People have always suspected that tides are related to the moon, since high tides always occur when the Moon is highest in the sky and again when the Moon is lowest below the horizon. This turns out to be correct.

Tides occur because the gravitational pull from the Moon is greater on the side of the Earth facing the Moon than on the side facing away. As a result, the gravitational pull "stretches" the Earth. The tidal pull from the Moon gives the Earth an oblong shape. The pull affects the ocean more strongly than the ground, because the ocean is liquid and less resistant to movement.

The stretching effect from the tides creates two places on Earth where the tides are high, with one high tide on the side of the Earth facing the Moon and the other on the side opposite the Moon. As the Earth rotates, the locations under the positions of high tides also move. If the moon didn't orbit around the Earth, high tide would occur exactly twice a day, every 12 hours. The orbit of the moon changes the position of the high tides over the course of the month, which lengthens the time between high tides to about 12½ hours.

The Sun also has a tidal influence on the Earth, although this is a much smaller effect than the Moon's tidal influence. Because of the difference in the gravitational pull from the Sun on opposite sides of the Earth is much smaller, the Sun's tendency to make the Earth bulge is much less. Still, the contribution to tides from the Sun is noticeable. When the Sun, Moon and Earth are aligned, the Sun adds to the Moon's tidal pull, making the tides greater. This is called the spring tide. (The spring tide has no connection with the season of spring.) When the Moon is at a right angle with the Sun, the Sun's tidal pull interferes with the Moon's, making the tides weaker. This configuration is called the neap tide.