PHYS 190 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Depth Perception, Dailymotion, Capricornus

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Physics
• Course: PHYS 190
• Professor: Howard Trottier

Document Summary

Distance between pluto- sun is 6 billion kilometres -> 1km model. Halifax sizes and orbits are not on the same scale. 1 au= sun-earth distance = 150 million kilometres. Wide-angle view : mid- january, looking south, roughly 8-10 pm. On given night under night skies you can see about 3,000 stars. Innate tendency to see patterns even where none truly exist . Northern skies- babylonian/greek/arabic myths no scientific meaning only used to reference location in the sky. Rank the stars: order of brightness [greek alphabet] alpha greatest, beta- second. Stellar magnitude scale : use a number to rate brightness of stars. Difference of 5 magnitudes is a factor of 100 in brightness. Difference of 1 magnitude is factor of about 2. 5 in brightness. Why a sphere, what would sky shape be for an astronaut floating in deep space. We do not have depth perception because the stars are so far away brain judges the starts to have an equal distance.