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The variation of Mars's axial tilt is much larger than for Earth because it lacks the stabilizing influence of a large moon like Earth's Moon. Mars has a 124,000-year obliquity cycle compared to 41,000 years for Earth.
View of the ocean with two ships: one in the foreground and one to the left of it on the horizon. Historically, the distance to the visible horizon has long been vital to survival and successful navigation, especially at sea, because it determined an observer's maximum range of vision and thus of communication, with all the obvious consequences for safety and the transmission of information ...
On terrestrial planets and other solid celestial bodies with negligible atmospheric effects, the distance to the horizon for a "standard observer" varies as the square root of the planet's radius. Thus, the horizon on Mercury is 62% as far away from the observer as it is on Earth, on Mars the figure is 73%, on the Moon the figure is 52%, on ...
Celestial navigation by taking sights of the Sun and the horizon whilst on the surface of the Earth is commonly used, providing various methods of determining position, one of which is the popular and simple method called "noon sight navigation"—being a single observation of the exact altitude of the Sun and the exact time of that altitude ...
Mars comes closer to Earth more than any other planet save Venus at its nearest—56 million km is the closest distance between Mars and Earth, whereas the closest Venus comes to Earth is 40 million km. Mars comes closest to Earth every other year, around the time of its opposition, when Earth is sweeping between the Sun and Mars. Extra-close ...
At around 600 miles wide and up to 6,000 meters (nearly four miles) deep, the Drake is objectively a vast body of water. To us, that is. To the planet as a whole, less so.
The greatest elongation of a given inferior planet occurs when this planet's position, in its orbital path around the Sun, is at tangent to the observer on Earth. Since an inferior planet is well within the area of Earth's orbit around the Sun, observation of its elongation should not pose that much a challenge (compared to deep-sky objects, for example).
Coordinate systems in astronomy can specify an object's relative position in three-dimensional space or plot merely by its direction on a celestial sphere, if the object's distance is unknown or trivial. Spherical coordinates, projected on the celestial sphere, are analogous to the geographic coordinate system used on the surface of Earth.