Earth and Sun – Bartosz Ciechanowski

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2021-07-04 17:00:03

The day-night cycle and the cycle of the seasons have been an important part of human civilization for millennia. Today the discoveries from centuries ago are well known, but despite the superficial simplicity of Earth revolving around its axis and orbiting the Sun, the interaction between those two actually forms a fairly complex system.

This blog post will talk about space and how our planet moves through it, so it’s only fitting if we embed ourselves in the cosmos itself.

Over the course of this article I’ll try to explain how the Sun and the various motions of the Earth end up making our planet look like in the demonstration below. You can drag the globe around to see it from different perspectives and use the sliders to change the date and time:

It’s hard to talk about Earth and Sun without referencing a few dimensions and dates. They’ll be shown in imperial metric units (e.g. 1 mi 1 km ) and an American an international date format (mm/dd/yyyy dd/mm/yyyy ), but you can switch to the more universal American units if you prefer.