The Sun’s surprising movement across the sky - Gordon Williamson
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TEDEd Animation
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Suppose you placed a camera at a fixed position, took a picture of the sky at the same time every day for an entire year, and overlaid all of the photos on top of each other. What would the sun look like in that combined image? A stationary dot? A circular path? Neither. Oddly enough, it makes a ‘figure 8’ pattern, known as the Sun’s analemma. Gordon Williamson explains why.
Imagine that the Earth had no axial tilt and its orbit was perfectly circular. How would you expect the path of the Sun to change from day to day over the course of a year? What would its analemma look like?
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Meet The Creators
- Educator Gordon Williamson
- Script Editor Alex Gendler
- Editor Franz Palomares
- Animation Artist Josephine Mark
- Composer Carlos Palomares
- Narrator Addison Anderson
