How can the sun pass through 13 constellations every day but 12 every year?

Answer 1

The Earth's orbit causes changes to our night sky.

From month to month you can see different constellations in the night sky. These changes occur because the Earth is revolving around the sun. As the Earth travels in its orbit, the Sun appears to be in front of different constellations of the zodiac. The sun's position determines which stars are hidden in the sun's glare and which stars are in the evening and morning skies.

For example, my birth sign is Scorpio. This means that during late November the sun blocks the constellation Scorpius. It does not mean that the scorpion is in the evening sky, rather, the constellation opposite the scorpion would be in the sky.

Try this..... Draw a circle. On the outside of the circle list the zodiac constellations in this order....Pisces, Aquarius, Capricornus, Sagittarius, Scorpius, Libra, Virgo, Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, and Aries. To help you space them out, Pisces should be across from Virgo. Gemini across from Sagittarius.

In Spring time, in the northern Hemisphere, the sun blocks Pisces and Virgo is high in our night sky. In Summer, the sun appears to block Gemini which means Sagittarius is high in our night sky. For fall, the earth has revolved around the sun and now Virgo is blocked revealing Pisces in our sky. and then in Winter, the earth moves farther along it's orbit and the sun appears to block Sagittarius allowing us to see Gemini at night.

There are also several constellations that are always in our night sky ever night of the year. These are circumpolar constellations meaning they circle the pole and never dip below our horizon and out of sight.

Ursa Minor and Ursa Major are two popular circumpolar constellations. They contain the little and big dippers respectively. There is also Draco, Casseopeia and Chepus. The circumpolar constellations will vary based on your latitude. I'm at about 40 degrees latitude, so these are a few that I can see all year long.

Answer 2

The sun appears to move through 13 constellations in a day because of the Earth's axial tilt. However, the traditional zodiac system only includes 12 constellations that the sun passes through over the course of a year. This discrepancy is due to the historical development of the zodiac signs, which were defined over 2,000 years ago and have remained constant despite astronomical shifts.

Answer 3

The center of the sun moves through 13 constellations each year. (If you thought only 12, you were probably not counting Ophiuchus.)
To anyone watching from the surface of the earth, the center of the sun appears to pass through thirteenconstellations during the course of one year. One of them, Ophiuchus has traditionally been ignored by astrologers, and the other 12 were thought to have some special significance in the affairs of earth people, and they were endowed in folklore with all kinds of special properties and characteristics. They are the 12 constellations of the Zodiac ... familiar to anyone who reads the Astrology column on the Comics page.

It must be mentioned that the sun does not actually physically pass through groups of stars. It only looks that way because the sun is in the same direction as those constellations are.

(In the same way, when my car is parked in front of my house and I'm sitting in my kitchen, my car appears to be located right between the two houses across the street, although the car is actually much closer to me than those houses are.)

Regarding Ophiuchus, the Sun spends more time in Ophiuchus (about two weeks per year) than it does in Scorpius (which astrologers call Scorpio).

Answer 4

Relative to our view from the Earth the Sun transits about 1 degree each day along the ecliptic. Constellations in the Zodiac are about 30 degrees, so the Sun does not pass through any constellations in one day but may move from one constellation to the next. The center of the Sun transits 13 constellations each year.

Answer 5

It is more accurate to say that the Sun passes in front of them, in that as we look at the sun, the constellations are behind them. The constellations are the ones that we associate with the signs of the zodiac. They are:

Aries
Taurus
Gemini
Cancer
Leo
Virgo
Libra
Scorpio
Sagittarius
Capricorn
Aquarius
Pisces

In addition to these, the Sun also briefly passes Ophiuchus in December.

Answer 6

In space, outside our atmosphere, the stars are always visible. The reason you can't see the stars all the time here on Earth is because our atmosphere scatters the sunlight so that the entire sky appears bright.

But you can see stars - at least one or two - in plain daylight many places on Earth as well. At the bottom of a well, or in a dark cave with a small opening to the sky, the scattered light will be absorbed, while the direct light of a star can be seen.

____________

Stars are visible all year (but of course only at night) in the torrid or temperate zones; anywhere on earth between the Arctic Circle and the Antarctic circle. Within those circles there will be at least a short period of days without sunset.

Answer 7

Oh, you are in for a couple of mind-boggling insights! The basic insight to get is the idea of apparent motion and how it is different from proper motion. The sun APPEARS to go around the entire sky, in a huge circle, over the course of a day. But it does NOT. It appears to do this because YOU are on a spinning ball, earth. You may not have noticed this yet, but if you look at the stars at night you will notice that they are 'moving' across the sky; they appear to rise in the east and set in the west, and some may be high enough in the sky that they never dip below the horizon. This too is because of the earth's spin. Neither the sun, nor the distant 'fixed' stars are actually moving around the earth. These are examples of apparent motion.

The earth's spin on its axis is a proper motion of planet earth; we really are on a spinning ball. If you could see the stars during the day that are blocked from view by direct or indirect sunlight and by clouds and haze, you would see that the sun 'appears' to move against the 'fixed' stars rather slowly, and it does not pass through several constellations per day.

The same situation holds for the 'movement' of the sun over the course of a year. This is another apparent motion of the sun; it doesn't move at all in the way that we observe. But as the earth moves in its orbit around the sun (our orbit is another proper motion of earth) then we observe the sun apparently moving slowly across the sky.

Answer 8

Unfortunately because the Sun is a gas, different parts of it rotate at different speeds.

• At the equator, the Sun completes one "day" in 25.05 Earth days
• At 16o the Sun completes one "day" in 25.38 Earth days
• and at the poles 34.2 Earth days.

Taking the average of 28.21 days means that the Sun rotates about 13 (12.95) times in one Earth Year.

Answer 9

Constellations do a complete, 360-degree rotation around the entire sky, once every 23hours 56minutes 4seconds.

So if you only peek at the sky once a night, always at the same time, then according to your wristwatch, it looks

as if the constellations gain almost 4 minutes -- or move about 1 degree west -- every 24 hours.

If that's all the observing you do, you might think that the constellations move around the earth once a year.

But you would be wrong.

Answer 10

The Sun doesn't "travel through constellations". A constellation is just a direction in the sky, as seen from us. We see a group of stars that looks like a scorpion, and call it "constellation scorpion", but one of those stars might be hundred times farther away than another.