US Hawks Hang Gliding Association

It's about 1:19pm local time (PDT), and the two posts before mine show as being posted just after 1pm. So those times are correct from where I'm sitting. Here are my time zone settings:



After that, I tried changing my settings to Mountain time (UTC-7), and the times on all of these posts changed by 1 hour (for example, 1:19 changed to 2:19). That would be correct if I were in Mountain time.

Now I just hope I don't get distracted and forget to set it back!!   

My dizziness is letting up.

wingspan33 wrote:I, . . . . think, . . . . I'm, . . . . getting, . . . . dizzy.

I keep it straight in my mind when I picture the sun directly overhead (but slightly to the south) as noon and indicating south.

To the right of the sun is west. The time zone to the west will not have the sun directly over head for one more hour so they have 11:00am now while I’m having noon. I adjust from that premise.

One thing I didn’t figure out until I was in twelfth grade was that the moon moves around the Earth in the opposite direction that it appears to move.

It appears to rise in the east, like the sun, and the moon appears to set in the west like the sun.

And unless I had a misprint in my encyclopedia collection the moon travels around the Earth from west to east. We are spinning faster than the moon can keep up so it is losing the race in the same direction. This makes it appear to be moving east to west. But it is not. It is moving west to east.
(Help! I'm drifting off topic --- Save me! --- Or join me.)

billcummings wrote:One thing I didn’t figure out until I was in twelfth grade was that the moon moves around the Earth in the opposite direction that it appears to move.

It appears to rise in the east, like the sun, and the moon appears to set in the west like the sun.

And unless I had a misprint in my encyclopedia collection the moon travels around the Earth from west to east. We are spinning faster than the moon can keep up so it is losing the race in the same direction. This makes it appear to be moving east to west. But it is not. It is moving west to east.
(Help! I'm drifting off topic --- Save me! --- Or join me.)

This is what I LOVE about life! You learn something new each day!

I knew that the moon rotates on it's own axis in a way that makes it's same face (the "bright" side of the moon) point toward the earth at all times. That means that it rotates with the same face towards us as it spins on its own axis. I couldn't have told you that its rotational period around earth was 28 days, only that its "phases" lasted 28 days.

I also didn't know that it rotates west to east during that 28 day period. And I call myself an amateur astronomer (own about 6 telescopes of varying size)?

Thanks Bill for changing my view of our local solar system! That's a BIG deal!

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon:

When viewed from the north celestial pole, i.e. from the star Polaris, the Moon orbits the Earth anticlockwise, the Earth orbits the Sun anticlockwise, and the Moon and Earth rotate on their own axes anticlockwise.

That makes it all very clear.

By the way, I think it was in the 80's when one of the 3 national television networks (ABC, CBS, or NBC) had a spinning globe animation in the upper right corner of the screen when the news anchor was speaking. I remember one night, the anchor quoted a letter that they had gotten from some viewer who had noted that their globe had been spinning ... the wrong direction!     

So even the people who are supposed to know "everything" ... sometimes get it wrong.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was on the Daily Show (on Comedy Central) and noted that in the introductory images of the Daily Show the earth rotates in the wrong direction.

He was RIGHT!

I'm surprised that, to this day, that the video effect has not been changed to fit the reality of things.

Bill Cummings wrote:Just noticed my time stamp was not MDST and reset it.
I went to "User Control Panel"
next I clicked the "Board preferences" button.
Then daylight savings button.

Just today I noticed that I had forgot to switch back to standard time.
Note procedure above.

wingspan33 wrote:Neil deGrasse Tyson was on the Daily Show (on Comedy Central) and noted that in the introductory images of the Daily Show the earth rotates in the wrong direction.

It's not the first ...



I also remember that one of the nightly news broadcasts from decades ago had their globe spinning the wrong way. I thing a viewer wrote in about it, and the anchorman commented that they had fixed it. I searched the web for a clip of that broadcast but could only find the one above.

Well, here's the specific 20 second clip of Neil Degrasse Tyson telling Jon Stewart that the Earth (at the beginning of the show) is spinning the wrong way.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9eTru16aDc [/youtube]

Oddly, the video is a mirror image of the actual vid. The title on the book that Stewart is holding is backwards. That means that if you could actually see the globe it would be spinning the correct way!

Some people worried about copyright post
in truly mirrored image in the belief that doing so
will protect them legally.