Outside the tropics we experience four seasons – Spring, Summer, Autumn, or Fall, and Winter. These occur because the Earth’s axis about which it rotates once a day is tilted at an angle relative to the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Because the axis always points towards the north star throughout the year, the seasons are cyclical. In the northern hemisphere, when the North Pole points towards the sun, the sun’s light is more directly overhead at mid-day and the sun is in the sky for longer; it is summer. At this time the opposite is true in the Southern hemisphere.
Spring and Autumn are the half-way points when the Earth’s tilt is neither angled towards or away from the sun. These seasons usually have milder temperatures than the extremes of winter and summer. The difference between spring and autumn is essentially one of biology as the organisms experience warming day after day in Spring and respond accordingly and cooling day after day in Autumn.
So, all that in hand, it must have been quite confusing for viewers of the BBC’s latest scientific blockbuster “The Wonders of the Solar System” to watch the earth wobbling like a spinning top as it orbited the sun and learning that this change is the cause of the seasons. Actually, the way they showed it, the Earth was static and the sun was orbiting it.
Now, the producers were actually using the 3D graphics to show the relative position of the tilt of the Earth’s axis to the “fixed” sun. Whereas what they showed did resemble astronomical precession (which does not cause the seasons). Precession is the regular oscillation of the axis of any spinning object whether gyroscope or planet, that occurs as the object rotates.
Precession will be familiar to anyone who has played with a child’s spinning top or a gyroscope (a spinning top for grown ups). The main axial oscillation is slower than the spinning but is quite visible. For the much bigger Earth, spinning on its axis once a day, the oscillation of that axis is much slower. The main large precession of the Earth’s axis takes tens of thousand years to complete a single loop.
Despite precession being a long timescale feature of the Earth, it has a number of observable effects, if you’re willing to wait. First, the positions of the south and north celestial poles appear to move in circles against the space-fixed backdrop of stars, completing one circuit in 25,771.5 years (measured at the year 2000 rate). So, the north star, Polaris, today lies approximately at the north celestial pole, this will change over time, and other stars will become the “north star”, today’s north star was not the north star seen by the earliest human navigators thousands of years ago. It also provides a point of confusion for historians looking at ancient star charts and scientists must take it into account in climate studies, for instance.
I modified this post after Brian Cox commented. I *did* understand what they were showing and what they were trying to show. But, I and others, felt the imagery might have been somewhat confusing for the average viewer.