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The rotational axis of Earth, for example, is the imaginary line that passes through both the North Pole and South Pole, whereas the Earth's orbital axis is the line perpendicular to the imaginary plane through which the Earth moves as it revolves around the Sun; the Earth's obliquity or axial tilt is the angle between these two lines.
Axial precession will promote more extreme variation in irradiation of the northern hemisphere and less extreme variation in the south. When the Earth's axis is aligned such that aphelion and perihelion occur near the equinoxes, axial tilt will not be aligned with or against eccentricity. [citation needed]
One full orbit later, when the Sun has returned to the same apparent position relative to the background stars, the Earth's axial tilt is not now directly toward the Sun: because of the effects of precession, it is a little way "beyond" this. In other words, the solstice occurred a little earlier in the orbit.
^ Axial tilts for most satellites assumed to be zero in accordance with the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac: "In the absence of other information, the axis of rotation is assumed to be normal to the mean orbital plane."
A celestial object's axial tilt indicates whether the object's rotation is prograde or retrograde. Axial tilt is the angle between an object's rotation axis and a line perpendicular to its orbital plane passing through the object's centre. An object with an axial tilt up to 90 degrees is rotating in the same direction as its primary.
For planets and other rotating celestial bodies, the angle of the equatorial plane relative to the orbital plane – such as the tilt of the Earth's poles toward or away from the Sun – is sometimes also called inclination, but less ambiguous terms are axial tilt or obliquity.
Saturn's axial tilt is 26.7°, meaning that widely varying views of the rings, of which the visible ones occupy its equatorial plane, are obtained from Earth at different times. [33] Earth makes passes through the ring plane every 13 to 15 years, about every half Saturn year, and there are about equal chances of either a single or three ...
The torque-free precession rate of an object with an axis of symmetry, such as a disk, spinning about an axis not aligned with that axis of symmetry can be calculated as follows: [1] = where ω p is the precession rate, ω s is the spin rate about the axis of symmetry, I s is the moment of inertia about the axis of symmetry, I p is moment ...