ASTR 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Foucault Pendulum, Coriolis Force, Northern Hemisphere

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Theme 2. 3 the size, shape and motion of the earth. Many people are surprised to learn that the ancients knew the shape of the earth, the fact that it"s round rather than flat for example. Aristotle, among the ancient greeks 2,000 years ago, was able to summarize several lines of evidence showing that the earth had to be spherical. The first of these has to do with the behaviour of stars. If you look at the top left hand panel, you see a representation of how. Polaris appears to be a fair distance above the northern horizon as seen from athens. The lower right hand panel shows that, by contrast, if one travels south to the city of khartoum in sudan, which would have been within reach of the ancient greeks, we see polaris low on the northern horizon. The same effect, of course, applies to other stars as well.

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