Why does the night sky appear to move slowly even though the earth is rotating at 1,000mph?
In: Earth Science
The other answers are not wrong, but there is another aspect to this: our brains and sensory organs have evolved to perceive time, and thus motion, within a certain range. Things that are moving faster, beyond the upper limit of our perception, are blurry, invisible, or just happening too fast for us to react to or even notice at all. Likewise, things that are below the lower limit seem to be motionless and unchanging. We call those things “slow”, but it’s only slow to us; what we think of as a small, slow-moving creature may perceive the same phenomena as fast.
Anyway, if noticing the motion of the stars was important to our survival, we’d have that ability. It wasn’t, so we don’t.
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