I went up to “my meadow” for a couple of days in early September. Long after sunset, I trod slowly out into its dark midst. From an elevation of 8000 ft., the stars appeared brilliant. No moon. The Milky Way bannered overhead, north to south. The headwall ridge of the meadow rose high in the east so that, as the Earth turned, stars crisply appeared. No rising above a low horizon of thickened atmosphere but a sudden winking on, high in the sky.
I found myself wrestling again with how to explain what we see with rising stars. Most of the profound paradigm changes in astronomy (the earth rotates, the explanation for seasons, the earth as part of a solar system, our position within the Milky Way Galaxy) are explained by using diagrams drawn from a “somewhere far away from Earth” point of view. To understand what is really going on by shifting our visual understanding away from our earth-bound point of view to a cosmic view is a fantastic intellectual triumph. For many of us, however, we have not learned to bring this different point-of-view’s understanding back to what we see from Earth. We come to accept the assumption taught in grade-school of “what we see seems to appear as such and such but in reality astronomers have discovered that it is actually so and so.” Science has changed the way we think of this universe but often we have not changed the way we see it. We see space with the eyes of tradition while thinking of it with the mind of science. We are left thinking that what we see is not the way the universe really is. This disconnect divorces us from an experience of understanding.
But if the astronomers are right and if all these appearance-shifting things are actually what’s going on, then that is what we should be seeing with our own eyes. And when we do see it truly, mind and eyes unite in an intellectually emotional greater awareness of who we actually are. So let me share the explanation I worked out in my star-studded meadow for what we see as the stars’ rise through the night.
Confusion and misunderstanding arise due to the perspective of our particular location. We live on a spinning planet. The direction the earth spins we have named East. A point I perhaps belabor to others is that “the Earth does not turn to the east” – like we have these directions and it just happens that the Earth’s spin aligns with the direction east. No, the rotation of the Earth is the fundamental direction from which we have developed our sense of direction and from that awareness has arisen the cardinal directions of North, South, East, and West; and East is the fundamental direction. Not north like many assume. North is secondary. The fact that Polaris happens to appear (temporarily for a few thousand years) above the North Pole has given the Northern Hemisphere a North Star. But East is the primary direction. We are spun directly, constantly, steadily without any seasonal or latitudinal or any kind of variation whatsoever, always to the East. Always we are turned to the east and so always the stars appear to rise up from the eastern horizon. So what we see as the result of being on a spinning Earth looks like this:
Looking straight east
The diagram above is accurate – with two clarifications. First, the horizon is drawn as a straight line. The horizon is an expression/result of the curve of the earth – in all directions. The earth stretching out ahead of us curves “down” and out of sight beyond the “horizon”. This same curve that creates the horizon also curves the horizon to both the right and the left (to the north and south in this case). But with eyes only a few feet above the ground, we don’t notice that curve. However, that line is curving and if we were to pull back further, the diagram would become like this.
When we pull back to this view, we realize the second clarification is that the first view I illustrated is the view one has when standing on the equator. Many of us are standing somewhere else.
Zooming in on me in my meadow we get
However, this is not the way I see it in my meadow. For me, up is the direction perpendicular to my local horizon. My local perspective rotates the picture above so that I experience this picture below.
Similarly, Alaskans perspective on our spinning sphere would show
while Australians down under would see
These variations have nothing to do with what’s happening “out there”. They have only to do with the variations in the local sense of what is straight “up” on a spherical planet. The confusion arises in the perspective of our particular location, not in the general movement of the stars.
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