Shape of the sun's spotlight

If we go by the image name we see that it was taken in Scarborough, a northern city in the UK. It's likely that what's in that image is the Northern Arctic's Midnight Sun. The photographer probably took that photo because it was a funny looking thing in the sky.

Midnight sun in Britain?  I hope you know your geography better than that.  The caption specifically says sunrise.  How could it be mistaken for something else?  Mysterious glares in the early morning?  Come on...

Lets do a test here. I'm going to Google Image Search for "Sunset" and see what comes up.

http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&q=sunset

Now I'm going to do a Google Image Search for "Glare" and see what comes up.

http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&q=glare

Ask any child of five what the Midnight Sun images most look like and they will undoubtedly pick the latter.

Nice try, Tom.  You're just ripping the picture completely out of context.  Ask any child to identify the bright object in the sky, and they will always say it is the sun. 

If the sun were reflecting off ice crystals all the way around Antarctica, you would not see anything that remotely resembles the sun.  You'd see a glow.

Tom Bishop is trying to obscure some very simple facts, that are evident to millions upon millions of people that live in the southern hemisphere:

- There is Sunlight in December for more than 12 hours; in fact, all the inhabitants of Australia, South Africa, Argentina and Chile (among others) can tell you that they have more than 14 hours of sunlight every day. And we are not talking about conspiracy-prone scientists and astronomers, but ordinary people that wake up at 5 or 6 am. and see the Sun already above the horizon.
- At the same time hundreds of millions see how the sunlight in the northern hemisphere lasts less than 12 hours. Millions of them see less than 4 hours of sunlight. Again, ordinary people.
- More than a million people live close to Punta Arenas, in Chile (plus many thousands of tourists annually), and can testify to sunlight lasting 16 hours and more during December. Again, ordinary people.
- All of those millions of people have seen a Sun that glides smoothly through the horizon, without strange reflections, distortions, or optical illusions that might make somebody think there is a Sun where there is none.

Even discarding the existence of a midnight Sun during all of the Antarctic summer, at the very least the shape of the Sun's "flashlight"  has to be like a bent sausage, to account for the long days in the south and the short days in the north at the same time. And we are talking about widely populated areas where it is impossible to get everyone into a "conspiracy".

So, Tom is not talking about a simple "flashlight": his Sun is a magical flashlight that bends the shape of its light around the northern hemisphere, working very hard to reach the south of South America and Australia without reaching Canada and the United States.

Quote from: trig on April 11, 2008, 09:13:56 PM

As already said, the shape of the Sun's light during the Winter Solstice (around December 21) is the following:

Remember, the grey area is nighttime!!!

Whoa whoa whoa Picasso, slow down there. That's what should happen if the earth were a globe. However, it's not.

This is not what should happen, it is what millions of people around the world experience every December, every year. You can place some doubt about the details concerning Antarctica, since you think everything about it is a "conspiracy", but the rest is simple, clear information shared by all humanity and unrelated to the shape of the Earth.

Quote

Your evidence is non-existant. My evidence is in those pictures, as well as the sun I see on cold days (-40F/C and below).

So you're saying that you don't have a rebuttal? That's all I needed to know.

Whats to rebut? You have no evidence at all. And I'm telling you that it looks like the sun, especially on a cold winter day. Therefore, you're bullshitting. You got no evidence at all , and you're just pulling this shit out of your ass.

If the sun were reflecting off ice crystals all the way around Antarctica, you would not see anything that remotely resembles the sun.  You'd see a glow.

Nope.

Nice try, Tom.  You're just ripping the picture completely out of context.  Ask any child to identify the bright object in the sky, and they will always say it is the sun. 

Ripping it out of context? Yeah right. The debate is whether what's known as the Midnight Sun is the sun or a glare. Show a five year old child a picture of the sun and a picture of a glare and ask what the Midnight Sun most resembles. He will pick the glare.

Whats to rebut? You have no evidence at all. And I'm telling you that it looks like the sun, especially on a cold winter day. Therefore, you're bullshitting. You got no evidence at all , and you're just pulling this shit out of your ass.

I've seen the sun on a winter day. It looks pretty normal to me.

Seeing it from a warm place is nothing like seeing it from a cold place. I know what I see, and I see a glaring, distant lightsouce in the sky in the winter. And Im not even that north!

Tom, your inexperience and lack of evidence shows.

Tom Bishop has eluded the very question that initiated this thread: "Shape of the sun's spotlight".

The existence of a real, complex question for which Tom Bishop has no acceptable answer, is evident all through the thread: how can the Sun simultaneously light more than half of every latitude south of the equator and keep all of the latitudes north of the Arctic Circle (approx. 66.5 degrees North) completely in the dark, during the Solstice in December?

If you include the fact that all the latitudes south of the Antarctic Circle are illuminated all day long that day, the problem for Tom becomes even harder, since the shape of the spotlight becomes a donut, as seen in my diagram, previously posted in this thread.

But even the simpler problem of explaining how the Sun behaves where millions of people see it every day is beyond his capabilities.

Millions will not get confused between a "glare" and the real Sun.

Besides that, I highly doubt a glare on one side of the ice wall could remain focused long enough to light up the other side.  Unless light is focused into a tight beam, like a laser, it eventually diffuses so much that it can't illuminate much.  Plus, if the glare were shining across the planet then why wouldn't it be noticed by everyone between the point on the Ice Wall it originated and the other side?