Effects of Axial Precession
Although the south Celestial pole currently lacks a bright star like Polaris to mark its position, slow changes over time (due to the effects of precession) mean that other stars will become southern pole stars.
The Celestial south pole is moving toward the Southern Cross, which has pointed to the south pole for the last 2,000 years or so. As a consequence, the constellation is no longer visible from subtropical northern latitudes, as it was in the time of the ancient Greeks.
There have been many pole stars throughout the millennia. Around 2000 BC, the star Eta Hydri was the nearest bright star to the Celestial south pole. Around 2800 BC, Achernar was only 8 degrees from the south pole.
In the next 7500 years, the south Celestial pole will pass close to the stars Gamma Chamaeleontis (4200 AD), I Carinae, Omega Carinae (5800 AD), Upsilon Carinae, Iota Carinae (Aspidiske, 8100 AD) and Delta Velorum (9200 AD). From the eightieth to the ninetieth centuries, the south Celestial pole will travel through the False Cross. Around 14000 AD when Vega is only 4 degrees from the North Pole, Canopus is only 8 degrees from the South Pole and is, thus circumpolar on the latitude of Bali (8 deg S).
Read more about this topic: Pole Star
Famous quotes containing the words effects of, effects and/or precession:
“The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of—career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.”
—Antonin Artaud (1896–1948)