Discussion about precession motion on 27th June,2007

Last Wednesday,we discussed two different topics put forward by Aniket. At the end of discussion, Aniket suggested 3 topics for upcoming Wednesdays. The topics are :
1. Comparison of different Stellar populations
2. Initial Mass Function
3. Stellar occultation due to small KBOs.

So this time, i.e. on 27th June, I had got information on 1st topic while Salil had got information on 2nd topic. But unfortunately, there were hardly 7-8 people due to heavy rains. As we didn't want all to miss this discussion, we postponed it to next Wednesday. Instead of that, I gave some pointers for the 1st topic to all so that we can discuss with more and more information next time when everyone comes filled in with some information regarding this topic. Salil said Initial Mass Function can be discussed only after 1st topic is done.

Without wasting time, we started discussing few other fundamental doubts we all had...some related to spectroscopy of the stars and some related to basic physics! Meanwhile, Dilip Joshi came up with a nice topic regarding Earth's precession motion. The question was when a top spins, its rotation and its precession are in same direction where as in Earth's case the direction for either of them is opposite to another. Why? Any guesses? Try it... I shall put answer in my next blog! :-)