![]() ![]() Just think of all the wonderful things you could do with this device!Īs a simple example, imagine you go to the equator near Quito, Ecuador, on the day when Mintaka, the right-most star in the belt of the constellation Orion, is directly overhead at midnight. ![]() Suppose we are given a magic wand, with an amazing occult power: if you point it at a distant star, any star (excepting the Sun), from any location on the Earth, it will forever stay pointed at that star. Let’s start by imagining we owned something perfect (almost) for demonstrating that the Earth is spinning daily. Unlike the demonstration furnished by a Foucault pendulum, this proof is clear and intuitive, involving no trigonometry, no complicated diagrams, and no mind-bending arguments. In this post I want to describe the best proof I know of that the Earth rotates daily, using something else our ancestors didn’t have. It is much more expensive to launch rockets westward than eastward, so both government agencies and private companies avoid it. Why is that? Because of the Earth’s rotation. You can look for them next time you have an hour or so under a dark night sky, and if you watch carefully, you’ll see none of them are heading west. The clue comes from the artificial satellites and space junk overhead. ![]() In my last post I gave you a way to check for yourself, using observations that are easy but were unavailable to ancient scientists, that the Earth is rotating from west to east. ![]()
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