In fact to go one step further if you take a camera on a 12 inch plate and rotate it you will see that even the stars that are offset by 23 degrees will make circles........you are letting the scale of it all confuse you about how the mechanics work and the two are independent in this case. Allen Daves <allendaves@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: Philip You don't seem to get the crux of the matter, rotaion of a camera is what is importaint. Not the magnitude of scale..a camera that rotates on a 12inch plate will show star trails..so will a camera on a 150mi km plate there no difference ....Your whole dialog about scale is irrelevant. IF it were relevant then a camera on a 12 inch plate would produce a differnt size star trails then the nightly........you say a ha..see you admit it will not be a different size because the are so far away and we are so comparably small..........and i will say but a ha................i'm discusing rotation in a totaly differnt direction,.... not the size or scale of any rotation! philip madsen <pma15027@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: Well so far everyone is carrying on under the thread "magnitude of scale" without comment on the points I made, and as if they just did not get it.. except Allen of course, because he re-sent out my diagram which Paul should have applied to his plank, but Allen seems to not understand photography. Or maybe he does. Polaris is 430 light years away on the hypotenuse of the enclined angle from the ecliptic. If we apply the formula H= sine 23 x430 we get polaris is 167 light years away from the ecliptic axis. On my diagram to scale where the planet is less than a millionth of a mm and the orbit is 0.5mm across, any object 13 kilometers away and to the left of the vertical another 5 kilometers, doesn't it seem rather irrelevant deciding what is an accurate camera angle? Even if the limit of the sphere was just 13k away.. But this sphere is infinitely further. I just have to say it again, there is no physical rotation of anything around the ecliptic axis, except in HC the planet earth. All of the stars as observed on earth rotate around the celestial axis for no other reason than that the world turns. If GC is spot on then the stars rotate around this celestial earth axis. If HC is spot on, then no stars rotate anywhere, and certainly not around the ecliptic. Its the insignificant earths orbital rotation that you are trying to record. In my diagram polaris can never ever appear to rotate around the ecliptic, anywhere except on a photographic plate, and this is only due to the plate itself being rotated once in 12 months. Because of magnitude, there will be no difference between what is observed or recorded in one daily rotation or one annual rotation. Why ? Because at that scale at 0.5 mm nothing has moved.. A camera is still in the DOT at any time. We can say that the image will be the same as if we were on the sun looking up the vertical axis, such is the magnitude we are at. Spin the camera anywhere inside that dot at any rate of rotation and the picture trails will all be identical. See dot magnified. attched Likewise if we were aimed at the celestial pole.. Except that all the stars will now all rotate around a different axis, and so individual stars will paint a different sized trail. But every trail will be identical in size for that location angle, irrespective of what time of the year or what rate the picture is exposed. And if the earth is fixed, and the stars rotate this will produce a circle on the plate exactly the same as the first instance. Nothing is resolved merely by pointing the camera to a different axis. And Why? the same old reason posted here for years.. No stable state of rest outside of heaven can be found. But the gyroscope is an enemy of geocentrism. The centuries long slow precession of the world physically supports a rotating world as its gyroscopic resistance to the more gradual curved motion due to galactic rotation, is ever so slowly opposed. These are physical realities. . Exercise: tip the world over till it is laying at 90 degree tilt . Now do all the pictires again... New earth axis, old earth axis, and ecliptic... Its gunna be difficult to keep the camera on the ecliptic pole. Philip