Exam 2: A Universe Made, a Universe Discovered

Suppose that you observe the sky at midnight and see the star Betelgeuse just rising above the eastern horizon.Where will it be at 6 A.M.?

While a planet is undergoing retrograde motion,what direction does it move relative to the stars?

Solar eclipses are rare because the:

Why are solar eclipses sometimes annular?

How does the location at which the Sun rises change across the year,for an observer in the Northern Hemisphere?

While driving at sunrise,you see the Moon high in the sky,with the eastern face bright.What phase must it be?

Describe the nightly motion of a circumpolar star.

If you know that Mercury is going to be visible,at what time and where in the sky would you look for it?

Suppose two of your friends,Alice and Bob,hold identical signs.Alice stands 100 m from you,while Bob stands 400 m from you.Alice's sign occupies an angle ________ as large as Bob's sign.

According to Ptolemy's model,a planet undergoing retrograde motion on the sky would be moving on its epicycle:

From night to night,planets typically move:

In order to explain the varying speed of the planets across the night sky,Ptolemy's model introduced:

Which of the following objects will have the largest parallax?

The angular size of the Moon is about 30 arcminutes,while its true diameter is 3,500 km.How far from Earth is the Moon?

Describe how Ptolemy's geocentric model accounted for the retrograde motions of the planets.

An observer at the equator sees the south celestial pole at what altitude?

You see two balls in the distance.The blue ball is half a degree across and rests half of a football field away.The red ball is one-quarter of a degree across and rests two football fields away.The red ball is ________ as large as the blue ball.

Which of the following astronomical sources always appears near the ecliptic?

The principle of Occam's Razor would favor which of the following hypotheses?

Suppose you stand on an asteroid that rotates in the opposite sense to Earth (in other words,if viewed from above the solar system they rotate in opposite directions from each other)but otherwise has the same orbital properties as Earth.To an observer on this asteroid,what would the path of the stars look like over the course of one "night"?