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To: Fichori
Lets say you had a device that had two arrows, one pointing in the direction of the incoming light of the sun, and the other pointing at the gravitation pull of the sun. (It doesn't matter how you spin this device, the arrows ALWAYS point DIRECTLY at their respective targets.)

Time for some history and astronomy lessons ...(NOTE: The sun is a star)

Starlight and Rain

The next substantial improvement in measuring the speed of light took place in 1728, in England. An astronomer James Bradley, sailing on the Thames with some friends, noticed that the little pennant on top of the mast changed position each time the boat put about, even though the wind was steady. He thought of the boat as the earth in orbit, the wind as starlight coming from some distant star, and reasoned that the apparent direction the starlight was “blowing” in would depend on the way the earth was moving.

Another possible analogy is to imagine the starlight as a steady downpour of rain on a windless day, and to think of yourself as walking around a circular path at a steady pace. The apparent direction of the incoming rain will not be vertically downwards—more will hit your front than your back. In fact, if the rain is falling at, say, 15 mph, and you are walking at 3 mph, to you as observer the rain will be coming down at a slant so that it has a vertical speed of 15 mph, and a horizontal speed towards you of 3 mph. Whether it is slanting down from the north or east or whatever at any given time depends on where you are on the circular path at that moment. Bradley reasoned that the apparent direction of incoming starlight must vary in just this way, but the angular change would be a lot less dramatic. The earth’s speed in orbit is about 18 miles per second, he knew from Römer’s work that light went at about 10,000 times that speed. That meant that the angular variation in apparent incoming direction of starlight was about the magnitude of the small angle in a right-angled triangle with one side 10,000 times longer than the other, about one two-hundredth of a degree.

Notice this would have been just at the limits of Tycho’s measurements, but the advent of the telescope, and general improvements in engineering, meant this small angle was quite accurately measurable by Bradley’s time, and he found the velocity of light to be 185,000 miles per second, with an accuracy of about one percent.

1,160 posted on 09/18/2008 3:41:43 PM PDT by ColdWater
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To: ColdWater
“Time for some history and astronomy lessons ...(NOTE: The sun is a star)

Starlight and Rain ”
[excerpt]
Yes, Light-time correction and the Aberration of light.
Very familiar with those two.

Annual aberration which is caused by the earth orbiting the sun accounts for 20.49552 arcseconds, or 0.0056932 degrees.
Diurnal aberration which is the earth rotating on its axis (like a car driving in rain) accounts for 0.32 arcseconds, or 8.88888889 × 10-5 degrees.

Wikipoodle has a nice article on theAberration of light
1,170 posted on 09/18/2008 4:15:38 PM PDT by Fichori (ironic: adj. 1 Characterized by or constituting irony. 2 Obamy getting beat up by a girl.)
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