The stars in the sky will stay the same - FactzPedia

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The stars in the sky will stay the same

 

The stars in the sky will stay the same


One of the beautiful things about the night sky is how the constellations change.

Unfortunately, if the Earth stands still, you’ll look at the same sky each night.

The constellations won’t be migrating across the sky or changing throughout the year.

The only real difficulty with this measurement is that you have to travel pretty far before the shift becomes noticeable. If you're careful, though, you can measure an angular shift of one degree whenever you travel directly north or south by about 70 miles. So, for instance, if you travel from Ogden to Provo (70 miles south), you'll see the North Star get lower in the sky by 1°. By the same token, stars in the southern sky will get higher by 1°. (Of course, it's hard to measure a shift of only 1°, so it's best to travel farther than 70 miles and measure the proportionally larger angles.)

Now imagine continuing your journey southward. For every 70 miles traveled, the stars shift by 1°. After 700 miles, the stars would shift by 10°. As you cross the equator, the North Star would disappear below your horizon, but you could continue to measure the shifts in the new stars that you see in the south. Eventually you would come to the south pole, then continue past it, now traveling northward, back to the equator, then to the north pole, and finally around to your starting point. The stars have now shifted by a full 360-degree circle, back to their original positions. And to accomplish this, you would have to travel a total distance of approximately

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