Regarding the right ascensions and declinations of celestial objects for the purposes of amateur astronomy, some coordinates ...

Closest to the horizon is pictured the celestial equator, a great circle on the imaginary celestial sphere. Since it is on the purely notional celestial sphere, the celestial equator is defined as ...

That’s only true if you are positioned at the very north or south pole, or from the equator. From the poles, however, all you ever see is the same half of the celestial sphere. From the equator ...

Earth floats in the center of this sphere so that its spin axis aligns with the North and South Celestial Poles. Earth’s equator, projected onto the sphere, becomes the celestial equator ...

Suppose you are standing somewhere along Earth’s equator and you look at a star that is directly overhead. If you look again after two hours, it would look like this: In the celestial sphere ...

Earth is roughly a sphere and spins on its axis ... Halfway between the two poles is the celestial equator, marking the boundary between the northern and southern sky. Mirroring the terrestrial ...

Early navigators used the sphere to plot a navigational triangle ... charts that gave the star’s angular distance from the celestial equator, or declination, and determining the angle at ...