A Text-Book of Astronomy

by George C. Comstock

Fig. 16.—The orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.

28. The orbits of the planets.—Each planet, great or small, moves in its own appropriate orbit about the sun, and the exact determination of these orbits, their sizes, shapes, positions, etc., has been one of the great problems of astronomy for more than 2,000 years, in which successive generations of astronomers have striven to push to a still higher degree of accuracy the knowledge attained by their predecessors. Without attempting to enter into the details of this problem we may say, generally, that every planet moves in a plane passing through the sun, and for the six planets visible to the naked eye these planes nearly coincide, so that the six orbits may all be shown without much error as lying in the flat surface of one map. It is, however, more convenient to use two maps, such as Figs. [16] and [17], one of which shows the group of planets, Mercury, Venus, the earth, and Mars, which are near the sun, and on this account are sometimes called the inner planets, while the other shows the more distant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, together with the earth, whose orbit is thus made to serve as a connecting link between the two diagrams. These diagrams are accurately drawn to scale, and are intended to be used by the student for accurate measurement in connection with the exercises and problems which follow.

In addition to the six planets shown in the figures the solar system contains two large planets and several hundred small ones, for the most part invisible to the naked eye, which are omitted in order to avoid confusing the diagrams.

29. Jupiter and Saturn.—In [Fig. 16] the sun at the center is encircled by the orbits of the three planets, and inclosing all of these is a circular border showing the directions from the sun of the constellations which lie along the zodiac. The student must note carefully that it is only the directions of these constellations that are correctly shown, and that in order to show them at all they have been placed very much too close to the sun. The cross lines extending from the orbit of the earth toward the sun with Roman numerals opposite them show the positions of the earth in its orbit on the first day of January (I), first day of February (II), etc., and the similar lines attached to the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn with Arabic numerals show the positions of those planets on the first day of January of each year indicated, so that the figure serves to show not only the orbits of the planets, but their actual positions in their orbits for something more than the first decade of the twentieth century.

The line drawn from the sun toward the right of the figure shows the direction to the vernal equinox. It forms one side of the angle which measures a planet's longitude.

Fig. 17.—The orbits of the inner planets.

Exercise 14.—Measure with your protractor the longitude of the earth on January 1st. Is this longitude the same in all years? Measure the longitude of Jupiter on January 1, 1900; on July 1, 1900; on September 25, 1906.

Draw neatly on the map a pencil line connecting the position of the earth for January 1, 1900, with the position of Jupiter for the same date, and produce the line beyond Jupiter until it meets the circle of the constellations. This line represents the direction of Jupiter from the earth, and points toward the constellation in which the planet appears at that date. But this representation of the place of Jupiter in the sky is not a very accurate one, since on the scale of the diagram the stars are in fact more than 100,000 times as far off as they are shown in the figure, and the pencil mark does not meet the line of constellations at the same intersection it would have if this line were pushed back to its true position. To remedy this defect we must draw another line from the sun parallel to the one first drawn, and its intersection with the constellations will give very approximately the true position of Jupiter in the sky.