OT: Earth's orbit changing?

[Suicide Junkie]

And btw, after some Googling I think the issue is rotational speed, not orbital speed. I couldn't find anything about earth's orbit changing, and I don't think we can measure that accurately enough to notice 1 second's difference.

Since the year is almost 360 days, a difference of one day would translate to a shift of about 1 degree in the star field.
Similarily, a shift of one second, would cause the starfield background to shift by one 24th of a second of arc (1/3600th of a degree)
Google tells me that a 150mm telescope has a resolution limit of about 0.9 seconds of arc.
Larger research scopes would of course be better.

So, if the orbital period of Earth was off by a second, you should see a shift in the starfield relative to the sun, of about one arc-second.

[ January 09, 2004, 23:26: Message edited by: Suicide Junkie ]