Our Rotating Earth
Video Credit & Copyright:
Bartosz
Wojczyński
Has your world ever turned upside-down?
It would happen every day if you stay fixed to the stars.
Most time-lapse videos of the night sky show the
stars and sky moving above a steady Earth.
Here, however, the camera has been forced to rotate so that the
stars remain fixed, and the Earth rotates around them.
The movie,
with each hour is compressed to a second,
dramatically demonstrates the daily rotation of the Earth, called
diurnal motion.
The video
begins by showing an open field in
Namibia,
Africa,
on a clear day, last year.
Shadows shift as the
Earth turns, the
shadow of the Earth rises into the sky, the
Belt of Venus momentarily appears,
and then day turns into night.
The majestic band of our
Milky Way Galaxy stretches across the night sky,
while sunlight-reflecting, Earth-orbiting
satellites zoom by.
In the night sky, you can even spot the
Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
The video shows a sky visible from Earth's
Southern Hemisphere,
but a similar video could be made for every middle latitude on
our blue planet.