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Find a place with low light pollution and low pollution on a clear, moonless night and you can see satelites with unaided eyes.
Quote from: "Max Fagin"Geostationary satellites orbit at about 20,000 miles. These satellites are much harder to observe, but it can be done in principle.
Sounds difficult.
... that the fixed stars are higher than previously suspected? Yes.
Ironically, there is a link to his works in the FAQ
http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/za/index.htm
Samuel Birley Rowbotham, under the pseudonym 'Parallax', lectured for two decades up and down Britain promoting his unique flat earth theory. This book, in which he lays out his world system, went through three editions, starting with a 16 page pamphlet published in 1849 and a second edition of 221 pages published in 1865. The third edition of 1881 (which had inflated to 430 pages) was used as the basis of this etext.
Rowbotham was an accomplished debater who reputedly steamrollered all opponents, and his followers, who included many well-educated people, were equally tenacious. One of them, John Hampden, got involved in a bet with the famous naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace about the flat earth. An experiment which Hampden proposed didn't resolve the issue, and the two ended up in court in 1876. The judge ruled against Hampton, who started a long campaign of legal harassment of Wallace. Rowbotham hints at the incident in this book.
Rowbotham believed that the earth is flat. The contients float on an infinite ocean which somehow has a layer of fire underneath it. The lands we know are surrounded by an infinite wilderness of ice and snow, beyond the Antarctic ocean, bordered by an immense circular ice-cliff. What we call the North Pole is in the center of the earth.
The polar projection of the flat earth creates obvious discrepancies with known geography, particularly the farther south you go. Figure 54 inadvertantly illustrates this problem. The Zetetic map has a severly squashed South America and Africa, and Australia and New Zealand in the middle of the Pacific. I think that by the 19th century people would have noticed if Australia and Africa were thousands of miles further apart than expected, let alone if Africa was wider than it was long!
The Zetetic Sun, moon, planets and stars are all only a few hundred miles above the surface of the earth. The sun orbits the north pole once a day at a constant altitude. The moon is both self-illuminated and semi-transparent. Eclipses can be explained by some unknown object occulting the sun or moon. Zetetic cosmology is 'faith-based', based, that is, on a literal interpretation of selected Biblical quotes. Hell is exactly as advertised, directly below us. Heaven is not a state of mind, it is a real place, somewhere above us. He uses Ussherian Biblical chronology to mock the concept that stars could be millions of light years away. He attacks the concept of a plurality of worlds because no other world than this one is mentioned in the Bible.
Rowbotham never adequately explains his alternative astronomy. If the Copernican theory so adequately explains planetary motions, why discard it, and what would he use in its place? What is the sun orbiting around once a day and how does it work like a spotlight, not a 'point source'? If the moon is self-luminous, what creates its phases? If gravity appears to work here on earth, why doesn't it apply to the celestial objects just a few hundred miles up?
To make his system work he had to throw out a great deal of science, including the scientific method itself, using instead what he calls a 'Zetetic' method. As far as I can see this is simply a license to employ circular reasoning (e.g., the earth is flat, hence we can see distant lighthouses, hence the earth is flat).
Zetetic Astronomy is a key work of flat-earth thought, just as Donnelly's Atlantis, the Antediluvian World is still considered required reading on the subject of Atlantis. If you ever have to debate the flat earth pro or con, this book is a complete agenda of each point that you'll have to argue.
--John Bruno Hare, June 16th, 2005.
...I was thinking about this the other day and was going to propose a model for the sun and moon's orbit above the earth. As we seem to conclude, the earth may not have a gravitational field, itself, but that doesn't mean that other objects don't. ...
I'll just assume that article is a fascinating work of fiction; it is too long for me to read.
The radius of the sun's orbit around the Earth's axis symmetry varies throughout the year.
Q: "What about satellites? How do they orbit the Earth?"
A1: They don't, satellite signals come from radio towers.
Q: How do seasons work?
The radius of the sun's orbit around the Earth's axis symmetry varies throughout the year, being smallest when summer is in the northern annulus and largest when it is summer in the southern annulus.
Here are some very good diagrams of seasons on the flat Earth. The first is by thedigitalnomad:
I'm a huge Firefly fan, but hands-down BSG is the superior show.
omg the same two fucking photos. aaaaaaaaaaaaargh. If they're both real why are the oceans different colours? In any event, I'm probably going to go to university, study computing for 3 years as well as spending all my spare time doing the same then hack the internet and destroy all copies of those photos so that people have to post other photos of the Earth from space instead of the same ones over and over.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/za/za41.htm[/url]"]SPHERICITY INEVITABLE FROM SEMI-FLUIDITY.
An argument for the earth's rotundity is thought, by many, to be found in the following facts:
"Fluid or semi-fluid substances in a state of motion invariably assume the globular form, as instanced in rain, hail, dew, mercury, and melted lead, which, poured from a great height, as in the manufacture of small shot, becomes divided into spherical masses."
"There is abundant evidence, from geology, that the earth has been a fluid or semi-fluid mass, and it could not, therefore, continue in a state of motion through space without becoming spherical."
In the first place, in reply to the above, it is denied that hail is always globular. On examination immediately after or during a hail-storm, the masses present every variety of form, and very few are found perfectly globular. Rain and dew cannot so well be examined during their fall, but when standing on hard surfaces in minute quantities, they generally appear spherical, a result simply of "attraction of cohesion." The same of mercury; and in reference to the formation of shot, by pouring melted lead from the top of a very high tower into cold water, it is a mistake to suppose that all, or even a large proportion, is converted into truly spherical masses. From twenty to fifty per cent. of the masses formed are very irregular in shape, and have to be returned to the crucible for re-melting. In addition to which it may be remarked, that the tendency in falling fluids to become globular is owing to what, in chemical works, is called "attraction of cohesion" (not "attraction of gravitation "), which is very
p. 252
limited in its operation. Its action is confined to small quantities of matter. If, in the manufacture of shot, the melted metal is allowed to fall in masses of several ounces or pounds, instead of being divided (by pouring through a sieve or "cullender" with small holes) into particles weighing only a few grains, it will never take a spherical form. Shot of an inch diameter could not be made by this process; bullets of even half an inch can only be made by casting the metal into spherical moulds. In tropical countries the rain, instead of falling in drops, or small globules, often comes down in large irregular masses or gushes, which have no approximation whatever to sphericity. So that it is manifestly unjust to affirm, of large masses like the earth, that which attaches only to minute portions, or a few grains, of matter.
Without denying that the earth has been, at some former period, or was, when it first existed, in a pulpy or semi-fluid state, it is requisite to prove beyond all doubt that it has a motion through space, or the conclusion that it is therefore spherical is premature, and very illogical. It should also be proved that it has motion upon axes, or it is equally contrary to every principle of reasoning to affirm that the equatorial is greater than the polar diameter, as the inevitable result of the centrifugal force produced by its axial or diurnal rotation. The assumption of such conditions by Sir Isaac Newton, as we have seen when speaking of the measurement of arcs of the meridian, was contrary to evidence, and led to and maintains a "muddle of mathematics" such as philosophers will, sooner or later, be ashamed of. The whole matter,
p. 253
taken together, entirely fails as an argument for the earth's rotundity. It has been demonstrated that axial and orbital motion do not exist, and, therefore, any argument founded upon and including them as facts is necessarily fallacious.
