![Welcome to the NavList Message Boards.](../sx1.jpg)
NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2019 Mar 15, 15:09 -0700
Here's some silliness:
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20190312a/full/
This falls in the category of "true, yes, quite so... but, er... useless". And more than a bit silly. The real silliness is the amount of effort that went into validating this trivial result and the fact that it was published.
Back in college I had a professor who pointed out that the semi-major axis of a planet's orbit is not the average distance of the planet from the Sun in any meaningful sense of a genuine average. It is, however, the simple arithmetic mean of the nearest and farthest distances of the planet in its orbit. True, yes, this isn't much of an average, but that's (almost) totally useless information.
Actually in the orbital average distance case, there is one relevant case that is worth remembering: the average distance of a long-period comet from the Sun. On "average", how far is Halley's Comet from the Sun? If you average the aphelion and perihelion distances, you get the semi-major axis of the elliptical orbit, which is often called the average. But on "average" in a time-average sense, Halley's Comet spends most of its time way out there near aphelion.
This is off-topic for navigation. But I think it's close enough to topical for a brief side-discussion. Yes?
Frank Reed