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[-] InevitableSwing@hexbear.net 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

~300 to ~400 million years ago - wasn't the placement of all the stars in the night sky entirely different from the POV of earth?

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I made an edit.

[-] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 11 points 1 month ago

I think (but don't know, I'm not an astronomer) the ancient Greeks and Egyptians saw a different sky than we do because of the orbit around the center of the galaxy. I'd have to look it up, but that might have changed how constellations looked.

I do know in the far future (like several billion years), stars will be farther apart in the sky and eventually as the universe expands, you won't see anything except pitch black. It's spooky stuff ._.

[-] Sebrof@hexbear.net 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The more noticeable cause of the sky looking different for the ancient Greeks would be due to precession instead of Earth's orbit around the Galaxy. Precession is Earth's "wobble", the "rotation" of Earth's own axis of rotation. Like how a top wobbles around as it spins. It takes about 26,000 years for the Earth's axis of rotation to make "wobble around" in one cycle. So this is the larger cause of the night sky, and the pole star, looking different for the ancient greeks. But this impacts the apparent position of all stars in the sky. So Ancient Greeks could see certain constellations that are currently too far below the horizon for their contemporaries. The positions of these constellations have changed.

Earth's or the solar system's orbit around the galaxy takes about 230 million years, so this would have less of an impact.

But there would be some differences.

The stars are moving though as they orbit around the Milky way. Some stars move much fast than others and their individual positions could definitely change over thousands of years. From Universe Today

When a star is moving sideways across the sky, astronomers call this “proper motion”. The speed a star moves is typically about 0.1 arc second per year. This is almost imperceptible, but over the course of 2000 years, for example, a typical star would have moved across the sky by about half a degree, or the width of the Moon in the sky.

[-] Belly_Beanis@hexbear.net 6 points 1 month ago

Neat! I thought I was remembering stuff somewhat, TY for posting.

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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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