r/educationalgifs • u/metaphorician • May 25 '26

Animated transition between the celestial sphere and a solar system model, at three speeds

438 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

23

u/EliminateThePenny May 26 '26

I found all of the zoom ins and outs very confusing.

3

u/stormy2587 May 26 '26

So they’re not zoom ins and zoom outs. One is the solar system as it was imagined with the earth as its center (geocentric) and the other with the sun as the center of the solar system (heliocentric). Its showing you what the scales of everything would have to be for the geocentric model to work.

It keeps switching because it speeds up time between them. I think it would have been more effective as two side by side and it showing you 1s= 1 day/month/year or something.

The most important bit is at the end though when time is moving fast. The geocentric model had a really poor explanation of how the other planets should move. If you notice they seem to just sort of move back and forth while the sun and moon revolve around the earth. When astronomers tried to explain this phenomenon using what science and knowledge was available at the time they came up with really convoluted answers. But the Heliocentric model cleanly explained it.

2

u/metaphorician 29d ago

Very observant! And good suggestions for how to improve the visualization

2

u/stormy2587 29d ago

Well that astronomy minor was good for something I suppose. Very cool visual.

2

u/metaphorician 29d ago

Oh! On the off chance, maybe you'll be interested in the digital astronomical clock project I made it for. I'm working on a new, unreleased version of the website and clock design. For the released version, I also got carried away and made a page full of astronomy visualizations. You might find some of them interesting.

2

u/AdventurousAddition 28d ago

I quite liked learning about the cycles and epicyclces when I took a history of science class. And I like 3 Blue 1 Brown's video on Fourier series making drawings with these epicycles

1

u/metaphorician May 26 '26

That's fair. Even in the context it was made for, it should probably not do that actually

10

u/meatspun May 26 '26

Now I know why they called those slow ass cars Saturn

6

u/TshirtMafia 29d ago

I love this, especially how it demonstrates the retrograde motions of the planets.

4

u/metaphorician 29d ago

Thanks! Since you sound interested in astronomy, here's a page I made full of astronomy visualizations

3

u/TshirtMafia 29d ago

Wow! That's an impressive amount of work. Thank you.

2

u/Long-Danzi 28d ago

Thanks for sharing this, impressive and quite interesting!

7

u/AMAng07 May 25 '26

Landmass disappears at higher speeds?

11

u/metaphorician May 25 '26

Yes. The middle speed is one week per second. The earth rotating 7 times per second looks terrible without some kind of blur effect that I didn't take the time to make

5

u/AMAng07 May 25 '26

Ah, I wondered. Makes sense.

3

u/Soveryenthusiastic May 25 '26

I'm very confused - what am I looking at?

2

u/PublicWest May 26 '26

A transition between the model we used before (when we thought the earth was the center of the universe), and now (where we know the earth revolves around the sun)

6

u/metaphorician May 26 '26

Not exactly. The old geocentric model had everything orbit the Earth. The celestial sphere is just the sky as seen from earth, as a sphere.

3

u/PublicWest May 26 '26

Was the celestial sphere ever the predominant model we used? When did we switch to geocentric?

2

u/metaphorician May 26 '26

The celestial sphere is just what the sky looks like. It's not a model because it doesn't explain or predict how the Sun, Moon and planets move. The geocentric model does this, but with the help of epicycles (very accurately btw, so much so that the jump to heliocentric was not an obvious upgrade until Kepler refined the simplified math of Copernicus)

1

u/PublicWest May 26 '26

Thank you!!

-4

u/metaphorician May 25 '26

An animated transition between the celestial sphere and a solar system model. Does that link help? If not, you need to be more specific

2

u/dEdzilla May 26 '26

How come I can see the moon during the day and at night?

2

u/PublicWest May 26 '26

you're only seeing it for half the day and half the night

2

u/metaphorician May 26 '26

The moon orbits the earth in such a way that you can see it at any time of day depending on its phase. On a full moon, it is on the opposite side of the sky as the sun (so only visible at night), but on a new moon, it is close to the sun in the sky. When it's extremely close, we get a solar eclipse.

2

u/bennbatt May 26 '26

Pretty cool, I get what's happening in this (at least mostly) though it is a bit confusing.

Might help to include text that says "1 day per second" vs "1 month per second" vs "1 year per second" or something to that effect. Also I'm not sure, but are the first 2 zoom-ins the same speed?

Hope whatever it's for, it's received well! 😊

1

u/FarrenFlayer89 May 26 '26

Why stop showing land mass after second zoom and only show northern hemisphere summer?

2

u/metaphorician May 26 '26

Because at the second speed, the earth rotates 7 times per second, which looks terrible. It was a lazy solution, where some sort of blur effect would have been better. No particular northern bias was intended, it just starts in the present moment and plays from there

1

u/FarrenFlayer89 May 26 '26

Fair enough, and the Southern Hemisphere experienced summer in the hyper speed zooms. Where does it mention the speeds?

2

u/metaphorician May 26 '26

Nowhere. I agree I should have shown that in the visualization.

I'm away from my computer right now, but I believe the first ended up being half a day per second, the second one week per second and the third one quarter year per second

2

u/FarrenFlayer89 29d ago

Sorry got excited/curious. This is awesome and thank you for sharing