Anyone catch Last Day of the Dinosaurs on Discovery? Thought it was pretty awesome, especially the animation and the way they laid out the story. Highly recommend finding a copy or catching it on air.
That's cool. I have made that same essential speech, although not so eloquently to people who have gazed through my scope. A telescope that cost a couple grand, and decent DSLR and a laptop, can produce images and results that would have cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars only a few decades ago.
The guy needs a wedge though, to get rid of that field rotation.
Going on the off-the-top-of-my-head recollection of relativity and cosmology, but IIRC. . . .
I disagree with the narrator's claim that "the camera and the stars are static, it's the Earth that's moving" (or something like that).
Every point in the universe has an equal right to claim that it is at the centre of the universe, and all motion is relative, so, between any two objects whose relative positions are changing, each has an equal right to claim that it is stationary. Ergo, it's equally valid (or invalid) to claim that the Earth is the only static thing, with everything else moving around it, as the opposite.
Or I could be misremembering and and spouting gibberish. Either way, I sure used up a lot of the relatively short time you have left before death. Sorry.
Nope, you are right. You can have a co-ordinate system that results in the earth being the centre of the universe and stationary, and all the math for everything including orbits and forces and stuff will all work out equally well as any other system and produce results that match observations.
It'll be more complicated though than other systems.
I still find the most fascinating thing about space are wormholes and black holes.
That and how the universe was created. And how everything can rotate around each other. Like Neptune is far away from the Sun, FAR away but it somehow is rotating around the sun because of gravity, WHAT THE HELL?? Mind boggling.
