What spherical coordinates would you rather suggest?
East plus/minus 23 degrees is where the Sun rises. And with a different plus/minus value every day of the year. I happen now to live with a view to an eastern shore, but with various landmarks between me and the shore. I often take pix of the sun rising from the sea, and the difference between the position of Sunrise in June and December is striking. Yep, 46 degrees difference.
And can you (any you) remember, 4 or 8 hours later which direction sunrise was? To what tolerance?
I fully agree w the idea that most folks’ innate sense of direction, including my own, is probably only good +/- 30 degrees. We subconsciously fine tune that by landmarks or the road network. Which is great until there are no known landmarks, or no road network, or the ones you do have are misleading. Then confusion reigns.
The Cleveland streets are mostly a fairly regular grid, and so if one refers to north, south, east, or west, one usually means along the street pointed in that direction. But downtown, that grid is rotated by about 40 degrees, so “east” is actually pretty close to northeast, and correspondingly for all of the others.
That depends on your latitude. At the arctic/antarctic circle, it can vary by the full 90º.
Now I am wondering about— picture a tidally locked planet, so that the sun does not rise or set. Then nudge the rotation just a little bit— not sure how long you could make it last— so that the distant stars rise in one direction while the sun rises in the other.