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Comment by casenmgreen | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declination

"In astronomy, declination (abbreviated dec; symbol δ) is one of the two angles that locate a point on the celestial sphere in the equatorial coordinate system, the other being hour angle. The declination angle is measured north (positive) or south (negative) of the celestial equator, along the hour circle passing through the point in question."

Anyone who doesn't know what declination is, know from reading the introductory paragraph of this scientific Wikipedia article?

Anyone? no? :-)

I rest my case, m'lud.

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I've never heard of it before, and it makes perfect sense what it is from that intro.

On a celestial sphere (planet, star, etc) the declination angle (being 0 is at the equator, being 90 degrees is the north pole of the sphere, being -90 degrees, is at the south pole).

You also need another angle known as the "hour angle" to locate a point on the sphere. It doesn't explain what that is, but as can be seen on Wikipedia, you can easily click on that word to go to the entire page that explains what it is.

What don't you understand?

Well, you misunderstood / mis-guessed what celestial sphere means. Interestingly enough, your mis-understanding also sort-of works.

Well that was a whole other topic. And luckily it links to a page that explains the whole topic of what a "celestial sphere" is. Going to the page, I see I was indeed wrong about what it was, but now I see it is an abstract sphere, with a radius that can be whatever size you want, and that is centered on the Earth, or on the observer.

Once again, not so difficult to figure out even if you have no experience in the specific technical field of a Wikipedia article. So I have no idea what /u/casenmgreen's problem is.

I think I see casenmgreen's is trying to get at. But they just picked an example that (to you and me) just isn't all that complicated nor bad.

> Anyone who doesn't know what declination is, know from reading the introductory paragraph of this scientific Wikipedia article?

Why should this be a metric one would want Wikipedia to meet? It's an encyclopedia, not an astronomy course.

Of course, the brilliance of Wikipedia is that if you think you can write a clearer intro, you can do so! You could even add it to the simple language version of the page - https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declination

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