Trivial Observation, but

In the Optical Illusion category, if you walk by anything, (a house, fence, parked car) these objects could appear to be moving in the opposite direction. I just took a night stroll while looking up at the stars, and they appeared to be moving in the same direction I was walking. I wonder why the difference?

"When he was six, he believed that the moon overhead followed him. By nine, he deciphered the illusion, trading magic for fact, no trade-backs So this is what it's like to be an adult?"

Eddie Vedder.

reply to post by jiggerj


I can only guess but I would imagine perspective, distance, curvature of space, rotation of celestial bodies etc. has much to play here. Or is that pointing out the obvious?

Why, take the case of Thales, Theodorus. While he was studying the stars and looking upwards, he fell into a pit, and a neat, witty Thracian servant girl jeered at him, they say, because he was so eager to know the things in the sky that he could not see what was there before him at his very feet. The same jest applies to all who pass their lives in philosophy.

Plato

It's still moving in the opposite direction, just at a slower rate than the objects that are closer. So it appears to be moving against the closer objects, which are moving against you, making it appear to move with you.

reply to post by jiggerj


It should be impossible for you to watch the parallactic movement of stars. This is an instrument to measure the distance to closer stars, but usually it takes about half a year to detect a movement, as the earth half-circles the sun resulting in the maximum distance between two points of measurement.

As the stars are so very far away, it is not possible for the human eye to watch any positional change (aka "movement") of stars on a simple walk down the street.

It must have been something different, I think in ways of tricks to the eye, maybe by wandering through dark and light areas (lamps) or watching something really moving like a plane or a satellite - if you took that real moving point as a reference, therefore as a standing point, everything else would seem to move.

Trust me, the stars didn't move. We other 7 billion people would have seen that, too.

What direction were you walking?? East or West?? As observer (the observation point interperted as the 'normal' and stationairy) the stars would appear to be moving to the West. To complete a circle it would take app 24 hours. So If you would walk for a couple of hours to the west it could be interperted the stars move with you.

Ok that's the theory

Originally posted by ManFromEurope
reply to post by jiggerj

 

It should be impossible for you to watch the parallactic movement of stars. This is an instrument to measure the distance to closer stars, but usually it takes about half a year to detect a movement, as the earth half-circles the sun resulting in the maximum distance between two points of measurement.

As the stars are so very far away, it is not possible for the human eye to watch any positional change (aka "movement") of stars on a simple walk down the street.

It must have been something different, I think in ways of tricks to the eye, maybe by wandering through dark and light areas (lamps) or watching something really moving like a plane or a satellite - if you took that real moving point as a reference, therefore as a standing point, everything else would seem to move.

Trust me, the stars didn't move. We other 7 billion people would have seen that, too.

I started the thread with In the Optical Illusion category,

reply to post by jiggerj

Cuz it's far away and big and thus appears to be moving with you, rather than away from you.

This is also true if you're driving on a highway and look to your left through the window and see a distant ridge with some trees on its lip poking into the sky. They appear to be moving slowly while the trees nearby seem to whip by. I'm not versed in all of the math, but an object that's real close and you pass it by within a time span of 0.5 seconds, will have crossed a greater anglular motion than an object far away, even if it's equivalent in every way except distance.

I would think photographers or 3d-game programmers would get it immediately since they're familiar with thinking in terms of angles and math because they use them so mcuh in their work.

I am thinking of those projectors they use in classes or during talks.

As a matter of fact, the other day I was walking to the store and thought about how we can see shadows and rays of light through trees and how we can see our reflection in water. I was thinking about how people hundreds of years ago must have thought about light? Did they think it was a substance or an energy? Well, they must have seen shadows and rays of light and reflections, so they knew that light somehow must travel from point A to point B and/or be obstructed by something in-between. And yet you can't touch light like you can touch a rock or a tree, neither does it make noise. They couldn't store it in buckets like with water. A fun intellectual exercise.