Quote:
Originally Posted by Warren Platts
Everyone knows that the Sun and the Moon are the "mainspring" for driving the Earth's precession.
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You wouldn't know it from some of the twaddle in this thread, other threads, and some web sites.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Warren Platts
The question is whether Cytherian zyzygies that are in turn calibrated by the Sun's orbit around the SSB might possibly act as an escapement mechanism that could improve the constancy of the precessional period: [Image snipped!]
That is, the precession might be like a giant gearwheel in the sky with 144 * 112 = 16,128 teeth
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Come on,
Warren, get serious! Celestial mechanics have not believed in crystal spheres, gears, pulleys, "mainsprings" and "escapement mechanisms" as the cause of celestial motions since the time of Copernicus.
Newtonian gravitation is sufficient to explain the precession of the equinox. My precessional dialogues that I am always linking to calculated only the main lunisolar terms of the precession and got within 0.2 percent of the measured value. I was off by this amount not because of neglected causes such as the planets and higher order moments, but because in the interest of brevity and keeping the discussion elementary I ignored the eccentricities of the Earth and Moon, the inclination of the Moon's orbit, and the variational inequalities in the Moon's orbit. I hope to carry out a calculation soon that will take these into account as far as the squares of these small quantities and I expect to get within a tenth of a second of arc per century just from this alone. The contributions from the planets, relativity, and higher order moments are quite small. The flitting about of the Solar System barycenter is entirely irrelevant to the matter of precession.