Sidereal Time

Sidereal time /saɪˈdɪəriəl/ is a time-keeping system astronomers use to keep track of the direction to point their telescopes to view a given star in the night sky. Briefly, a sidereal day is a "time scale that is based on the Earth's rate of rotation measured relative to the fixed stars."

From a given observation point, a star found at one location in the sky will be found at nearly the same location on another night at the same sidereal time. This is similar to how the time kept by a sundial can be used to find the location of the Sun. Just as the Sun and Moon appear to rise in the east and set in the west, so do the stars. Both solar time and sidereal time make use of the regularity of the Earth's rotation about its polar axis, solar time following the Sun while sidereal time roughly follows the stars. More exactly, sidereal time follows the vernal equinox, which is not quite fixed among the stars; Precession and nutation shift the equinox slightly from one day to the next, so sidereal time is not an exact measure of the rotation of the Earth relative to inertial space. Common time on a typical clock measures a slightly longer cycle, accounting not only for the Earth's axial rotation but also for the Earth's annual revolution around the Sun of slightly less than 1 degree per day.

A mean sidereal day is about 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.0916 seconds (23.9344699 hours or 0.99726958 mean solar days), the time it takes the Earth to make one rotation relative to the vernal equinox. (Due to nutation, an actual sidereal day is not quite so constant.) The vernal equinox itself precesses slowly westward relative to the fixed stars, completing one revolution in about 26,000 years, so the misnamed sidereal day ("sidereal" is derived from the Latin sidus meaning "star") is some 0.0084 seconds shorter than the Earth's period of rotation relative to the fixed stars.

The longer "true" sidereal period is called a stellar day by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). It is also referred to as the sidereal period of rotation.

Maps of the stars in the night sky use declination and right ascension as coordinates. These correspond to latitude and longitude respectively. While declination is measured in degrees, right ascension is measured in units of time, because it was most natural to name locations in the sky in connection with the time when they crossed the meridian.

In the sky, the meridian is the imaginary north to south line that goes through the point directly overhead (the zenith). The right ascension of any object crossing the meridian is equal to the current local (apparent) sidereal time, ignoring for present purposes that part of the circumpolar region north of the north celestial pole (for an observer in the northern hemisphere) or south of the south celestial pole (for an observer in the southern hemisphere) that is crossing the meridian the other way.

Because the Earth orbits the Sun once a year, the sidereal time at any given place and time will gain about four minutes against local civil time, every 24 hours, until, after a year has passed, one additional sidereal "day" has elapsed compared to the number of solar days that have gone by.