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Video lecture for this chapter
Imagine the sky as a great, hollow, sphere surrounding the Earth. The stars are attached to this sphere---some bigger and brighter than others---which rotates around the stationary Earth roughly every 24 hours. Alternatively, you can imagine the stars as holes in the sphere and the light from the heavens beyond the sphere shines through those holes. This imaginary sphere is called the celestial sphere, and has a very large radius so that no part of the Earth is significantly closer to any given star than any other part. Therefore, the sky always looks like a great sphere centered on your position. The celestial sphere (and, therefore, the stars) appears to move westward---stars rise in the east and set in the west.
Even though it is now known that this ancient model of a stationary Earth is incorrect, you can still use this model because it is a convenient way to predict the motions of the stars and planets relative to a location on the Earth. A star's apparent brightness is actually determined by its distance, as well as, its physical size and temperature. It is also now known that the stars apparent motion around us is due to the Earth rotating once every 24 hours on its axis. The stars are stationary and the Earth rotates from west to east. This rotational motion makes the stars appear to move from east to west around us. The celestial sphere model is used by planetaria to simulate the night sky. I hope you will be able to distinguish between the convenience of the celestial sphere model and the way things really are.
Why a sphere? The Earth is spherical! This was known much earlier than Columbus' time. Sailors had long known that as a ship sailed away from the shore it not only diminished in apparent size, but it also appeared to sink into the water. The simplest explanation to use was that the Earth was curved (particularly, since those ships did come back without falling off some edge!). They also knew that if one traveled in a north-south direction, some stars disappeared from view while others appeared. The difference in the height of a star's height above the north or south horizon is directly proportional to the difference in the north-south distance of observers looking at the star at the same time. The simplest explanation said that the Earth is round, not flat. Pythagoras noted that the shadow of the Earth falling on the Moon during a lunar eclipse was always curved and the amount of the curvature was always the same. The only object that always casts a circular shadow regardless of its orientation is a sphere. This Pythagorean argument is passed on to us through the writings of Aristotle.
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last updated: January 18, 2022