Quote:
Originally Posted by EDG_
Uranus doesn't move very quickly in the sky, but the Moon obviously does. Have you checked to see whether what you're really looking at is the Moon being above a certain point on Earth relative to the Sydney area? Because at least over short timescales, that's more likely to have a bigger effect than Uranus.
(and why just Uranus? If it really did have an effect, wouldn't you expect Mars and Jupiter and Saturn to have an even bigger one because they're closer (and in two cases much more massive)?)
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Over the 27 years of the study, Uranus moved 114 degrees, almost one third of an orbit. My method looked at relative positions of moon and each planet, not position of moon above earth. I did expect Jupiter to have a bigger effect, and as my table in the second post (with apologies for loss of formatting) shows, the order of scale of planetary effects, in terms of the difference between peak and trough average rain over the monthly cycle for the study, was
Standard Deviations from average
Planet Driest Rainiest Range
Uranus -2.76 3.07 5.83
Venus -1.74 2.81 4.55
Neptune -2.37 1.77 4.14
Sun -1.46 2.39 3.84
Saturn -2.13 1.48 3.62
Jupiter -1.89 1.61 3.50
Mars -1.59 1.81 3.40
(Pluto and Mercury not yet tested)
What this means is that for example, the rainiest day of the Venus-Moon cycle was 2.81 standard deviations above average, while the driest day was 1.74 standard deviations below average, a range of 4.55 standard deviations.