Exam 21: Origins of Modern Astronomy

Relative to the celestial background, the Moon moves___________ .

Planets appear to move___________ each night, but occasionally they appear to stop and reverse direction.

The proposal that contends that Earth is in the center of the universe is called the___________ view.

The concept that Earth maintained a circular orbit around the Sun was suggested during the time of ___________.

The angular distance north or south of the celestial equator is called___________ .

___________was convicted of heresy for his views of the universe.

The concept that Earth was a sphere was established around the time of___________ .

If the earth were the center of the universe and the Moon, planets, and Sun all moved around the earth, logic would say that all of these celestial objects should move in the same direction across the sky, and relative to the celestial background. The Sun and Moon both follow this pattern, but the other planets have periods of retrograde motion. How did the Ptolemaic model explain retrograde motion and how is it more easily explained by the heliocentric model.

___________discovered Jupiter's four largest moons.

The Big Dipper is near the ___________celestial pole.

The apparent annual path of the Sun upon the celestial sphere is called the ___________.

Where will the North Star be, relative to the celestial coordinates, 12,000 years from now?

Kepler said that the ___________ goes. around the ___________on ___________orbits.

What is the right ascension and declination for Polaris, the North Star?

The ___________day is the time it takes for Earth to make one complete rotation with respect to a star other than our Sun.

The Southern Cross is a Southern Hemisphere constellation that is as famous the big dipper in the Northern Hemisphere because of the brightness of the stars. It has a Southern Hemisphere declination slightly higher than the big dipper's Northern Hemisphere declination. Is it visible anywhere in the United States?

An eclipse of the Moon can be seen by anyone on ___________.

Astrology is the folklore that arose from watching alignments in the night sky and the belief that these "celestial events" controlled human events. A 1960's folk song, "The Age of Aquarius" has numerous astrology references that relate to the positions of objects in the sky. The song has a line: "When the Moon is in the 7^th house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, then peace will guide the planet …" From your knowledge of the stellar constellations and the celestial coordinate system, what does this line mean?

Patterns or configurations of stars named in honor of mythological characters are called ___________.

The length of daylight on the Moon is about___________ .