Yes, it's important when considering setting up parallax experiments for the TYCHOS that we consider the location on Earth and even the times of day as well as the time of year.
However, the amazing thing to me is that you can already achieve a great deal of parallax in the TYCHOS just by selecting a long night and waiting 12 hours (such as from 6pm through 6am). You travel to a point "faster" by rotating each day than waiting for Earth to bring its entire self through as much space. Since the Sun is hidden most from parts of the world around its solstice, that would be a great time (and place) to take measurements. In 12 hours, Earth will travel about 12 miles, so you can add this to (or subtract this from) Earth's diameter at your location (depending on "where" midnight is) to guesstimate the distance you are checking on a star that you are "passing". A computer could be set up to watch star "rises" and star "sets" in a single night and we will most easily notice solstice parallax from periods around midnight since otherwise (closer to 6am or 6pm) Earth's rotation is actually bringing us towards distant stars and away from them. But this is just novel and we want precision. So let's avoid all that rotating of Earth and try to isolate
only Earth's PVP. That is, let's try to minimize the dizzying trochoidal motion of Earth and how can that be accomplished according to the TYCHOS?
I suggest an experiment (please help me design it!) that would be easy to simply measure, record and photograph the star positions as they appear at the same time each night for a week with the middle of the week being the solstice.
We can adjust for our rotating time reference ("the position of midnight" in the summer solstice faces the opposite direction from "the position of midnight" in the winter solstice) with the following idea:
360 degrees / 365.22 days is approx. 0.9857 degrees.
86400 seconds per day / 365.22 days is about 236.57 seconds.
24,900 miles / 365.22 days is about 68.178 miles.
Every 24 hours, our "midnight" moves by about 0.9857 degrees or 3.94 minutes of our day or 68 miles away on the equator. Well, let's just use 4 minutes and 110 km (roughly 68 miles).
- tychos parallax 2.GIF (14.62 KiB) Viewed 3704 times
So in order to face a reasonably precise parallel direction each night (we must take into account the PVP) we might say that we can take great parallax measurements at these times on the equator on the solstice, without having to move our work station:
June 17 at 00:16 (am)
June 18 at 00:12 (am)
June 19 at 00:08 (am)
June 20 at 00:04 (am)
June 21 at midnight
June 21 at 23:56 (pm)
June 22 at 23:52 (pm)
June 23 at 23:48 (pm)
June 24 at 23:44 (pm)
(If we don't adjust our time for the spinning factor then we could be exponentially off target by 110 km of circle section of the circumference each night. Every single minute that we "miss" the right time makes us inaccurate by 0.076 kilometers — over 70 meters — and with the PVP being so slow, taking over a week to give us our 300 km of parallax, every kilometer counts immensely so we want to measure our stars at
times that are as precise as possible.)
Done with good timing, as I suggest above, we will "eliminate" Earth's spinning, "isolate" the PVP motion of about 300 km in 9 successive days of star recording and get us
proper stellar parallax for once in Earth's history!
To be sure, here is just one small test of our accuracy. Note that the times and dates selected produce almost identical views, so our system is pretty consistent here and parallax should "show up" just about as clearly as we can have it:
- parallax_checker_2.GIF (72.61 KiB) Viewed 3702 times
Who wants to go to Ecuador's winter with me this summer? The dry ("winter") season typically runs from right around June to September! We could go many places, of course, and the North Pole in the winter would be another great place to check out since there's hardly any rotational motion but maybe we'll come up with more experiments while we're partying!
Another way for us in the Northern hemisphere would be looking as North as possible (maybe even focusing on Polaris and the little bear/dipper constellation) from a single location higher on the longitude. Since we are passing the "North stars" just as much as we are passing those stars seen past the "inside of the PVP," (opposite summer solstice) those seen past the "outside of the PVP," (opposite winter solstice) and the "South stars". Though, given PVP's curve the stars opposite the winter solstice sun should be moving "the fastest" and demonstrate the most negative parallax — which ought to really confound the heliocentrists!