Down Under and Spinning the Wrong Way

We live on a giant spinning ball of rock and metal. That is such a counterintuitive statement! Standing on its surface, the Earth looks flat, but that's an illusion borne of the Earth's huge size compared to us. The spheroidal nature of our planet becomes apparent when you travel around it; the clues are everywhere. One of the best, and most disconcerting for me personally, is viewing the skies from the southern hemisphere. Stars not visible from the northern hemisphere, hidden from us boreal ob...