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I guess this is what we're all doing this morning.
Instructions:
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favourite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
From Burnham's Celestial Handbook. It's too bad page 56 (57 actually, after the illustrations) is still in the introductory parts of the book; when he gets down to talking about actual objects in the sky, he has some very nice prose.
This was NOT the closest book, but the two closer than this were a sky atlas and a book on star clusters, which by page 57 has started into a few hundred pages of table data.
Instructions:
* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favourite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
Directions in the sky are defined by the celestial coordinate system. An object is said to be directly east or west of another if both lie on the same declination; an object is directly north or south of another if both lie on the same line of RA. For the simplest case, let us imagine we are facing directly south and looking at a bright star, as shown in Figure 1. Then "north" will be straight up, "south" will be straight down, "east" will be toward the left, and "west" toward the right. The seeming reversal of east and west may confuse beginners, but it is the natural and obvious result of looking outward from the earth instead of down upon it. When we face south, east IS toward our left, and west is to our right.
In other parts of the sky the directions became more confusing because our guiding lines of RA and Dec may appear tilted in various directions. In figures 2,3, and 4, we attempt to clarify the situation by showing the orientation of ht elines as they would appear if "printed" on the sky, along with a properly oriented star chart.
From Burnham's Celestial Handbook. It's too bad page 56 (57 actually, after the illustrations) is still in the introductory parts of the book; when he gets down to talking about actual objects in the sky, he has some very nice prose.
This was NOT the closest book, but the two closer than this were a sky atlas and a book on star clusters, which by page 57 has started into a few hundred pages of table data.
