TEXT: Spin me Around!

“The Sun comes up.”

“The Sun rises in the sky.”

Wrong! That’s not how the Sun works. We know that people say the Sun moves or rises. It looks like it does, but why is that wrong?

The Sun is not moving across our sky; Earth is rotating (spinning) on its axis, an imaginary line that goes through the center of Earth.

The Sun appears in the sky when the side of the Earth you are on faces the Sun. It’s daytime. When the rotating Earth takes you away from facing the Sun, it’s night.

The Sun appears to move across the sky because Earth is rotating on its axis. Earth rotates counterclockwise, so the Sun appears to move across the sky from west to east.

As Earth continues to rotate, the Sun appears to move across the sky. The Sun also appears to rise in the east and set in the west because of how the Earth rotates.