Please explain satellite tracking

2010.  The pictures belong to the company I used to work for.

You can do it yourself, though. Meade computerized telescopes can track satellites.

Great.  When did you do this?  Please, post some of your pics.  Thanks.

I really think you have to get over this tired old defence of your typical flat earther when backed into a corner jroa.  One doesn't necessarily have to "see" something with their own eyes and capture their own photo of it themselves to accept its veracity.

Presumably you believe in the existence of air—as described by scientists?  And carbon monoxide.  Etc.  Have you ever seen air, or carbon monoxide, or taken a photo of them?  Nope, of course not.  You simply accept the word of scientists as the truth.

End of story.

The proof of satellites in orbit is so obvious. The ISS is easily visible with a decent pair of binoculars, and smaller ones with a modest rich-field telescope. You FE idiots should just go out and look for yourselves, and you will see that it is the truth. I am an astronomer working for CSS tracking and cataloging near earth objects, esp potentially hazardous asteroids. I previously worked with the NEOWISE program and was directly involved in sending up the WISE infrared telescope satellite. I was involved in setting up some of it's system components, watched it's launch, and had access to it's operating systems once it was in orbit. I would no more doubt its existence and orbit than I would my custom ShredX Ducati 900 cafe racer sitting in our parking lot and the route I take to work each week. In the past i have also had access to earth observation satellites, and their imaging cameras. I can assure you that this planet is a sphere.

Thanks for your first-hand input NEO...

I'm afraid though that the flat earthers' answer—IF they respond that is—will be to say simply that you're either mentally deluded, misinterpreting what you think you're seeing, or acting as a "shill" for the NASA/Illuminati/Bilderberg/US government conspiracy.

We'll see.

NEO you got a 900 duke, and to think I was jellous of their flat cookies.

I find it funny that jroa believes that there are no satellited and there is no ISS for no reason.


Wait I remember. NASA is a group of satanists because their symbols look alike 

The proof of satellites in orbit is so obvious. The ISS is easily visible with a decent pair of binoculars, and smaller ones with a modest rich-field telescope. You FE idiots should just go out and look for yourselves, and you will see that it is the truth. I am an astronomer working for CSS tracking and cataloging near earth objects, esp potentially hazardous asteroids. I previously worked with the NEOWISE program and was directly involved in sending up the WISE infrared telescope satellite. I was involved in setting up some of it's system components, watched it's launch, and had access to it's operating systems once it was in orbit. I would no more doubt its existence and orbit than I would my custom ShredX Ducati 900 cafe racer sitting in our parking lot and the route I take to work each week. In the past i have also had access to earth observation satellites, and their imaging cameras. I can assure you that this planet is a sphere.

Agreed.

Again, one can't fail to notice the lack of responses over the past week from the flat earthers when confronted with undeniable evidence that contradicts their hypotheses.  Their silence is deafening LOL.

A week ago I asked jroa to address this question of moving "lights" in the night skies being part of his conspiracy theory:

Can you tell us exactly how the "conspiracy" produces these lights?  What mechanism would generate them, and how would they be positioned so precisely and regularly?    Remember too that earlier on you claimed that man-made satellites don't exist.  So these lights would have to be generated by some earth-bound source and projected somehow would they not?  If that's the case, then by what means are they reflected back towards earth?  And from what geographic locations on earth would they be situated?

And, as per usual, he never returned to offer any answers to these questions.  Why?  Because his silly notions are all bullshit, and he has no answers.  Pretty obvious really.

A week ago I asked jroa to address this question of moving "lights" in the night skies being part of his conspiracy theory:

I am sorry, but my phone and internet have been down.  I was not avoiding you. 

Can you explain every light that you see in the sky? 

An amateur not being able to explain a few lights does not disprove the explanation for the thousands he can account for.

I am sorry, but my phone and internet have been down.  I was not avoiding you. 

Can you explain every light that you see in the sky?

I saw your post about losing the internet for a week.  Ouch!   

Yes; I can "explain" every light I see in the sky—using accredited scientific references from multiple sources published by numerous space agencies across the planet.  I have no reason to disbelieve astronomical data drawn from independent sources, with no vested commercial interests and no collusion.

Can you please address my original questions about the non-satellite source of the lights (which I'll quote again in case you missed it):

Can you tell us exactly how the "conspiracy" produces these lights?  What mechanism would generate them, and how would they be positioned so precisely and regularly?    Remember too that earlier on you claimed that man-made satellites don't exist.  So these lights would have to be generated by some earth-bound source and projected somehow would they not?  If that's the case, then by what means are they reflected back towards earth?  And from what geographic locations on earth would they be situated?

Quote from: jroa on August 27, 2014, 09:51:01 AM

Pseudolites.

Pseudolites fly (actually I'm pretty sure they just hover) much lower than satellites allegedly do. It's simple trig to find out how high they are (assuming a flat surface for simplicity ). As you can see, there's no chance that a pseudolite could be mistaken for a satellite given two observers checking at the same time. A satellite will always appear at a higher angle to observer B than a pseudolite would.

So if the satellite tracking website states what angle the observers in A and B will see the satellite at. Ad least one will be wrong.
The same problem happens with what time two observer hundreds of kilometres apart will see the satellite.

JROA: I'd like you to perform a simple exercise for me, you'll need a powerful laser pointer and a friend who lives a couple hundred kilometers away. Lasers fire a beam in a straight line minus some very slight curvature due to Earth's gravity, I want you to place the laser pointer 2 meters off the ground, level with the Earth, and turn it on, pointed in a direction free of obstructions in the line of sight of the laser pointer.

Have your friend a couple towns over look up, make sure he is in line with the laser's beam, and have him measure its height above the ground. Also make sure you're both at the same height above sea level.

Now, I'm going to give you a moment to get yourself seated before I give you some fair warning, what you will see is going to completely blow your mind. The measurement your friend will return is going to be significantly higher than 2 meters! But you're both at the same height above sea level! How can this be, if the Earth is flat?!?

Simple answer is that it's simply not. If you send a camera up into space (Which you can do with a few thousand dollars nowadays), you can even take a picture of the Earth as it appears; a sphere.

Now, here's a slightly less practical experiment that you can try if you want to corroborate the ludicrous findings in the previous one. I want you to board an airplane heading East, make sure you're going to the same latitude as you're leaving from. Now, when you land there, take another plane heading East, again, making sure that you're landing at the same latitude. Do this until you find that your next plane ticket is for the place you took off from. But wait, how is this so? The Earth is flat, you can't circumnavigate it without coming to a sharp corner, and if you watched carefully, it was just smooth as far as the eye can see! Now, you may be thinking to yourself "Well IO just traveled around the rim of the disc!". Just to make sure, do it again, but with planes only going North, or as close as you can get to North. You'll notice the same effect! But that's impossible, no edges?!?

Now, I bet you'll assume that government spy satellites have been beaming false memories into your brain to make you think you didn't see any edges, but let's be honest here, the government doesn't have mind-altering satellites yet, come on, that's silly! Those go up in 2016.

JROA: I'd like you to perform a simple exercise for me, you'll need a powerful laser pointer and a friend who lives a couple hundred kilometers away. Lasers fire a beam in a straight line minus some very slight curvature due to Earth's gravity, I want you to place the laser pointer 2 meters off the ground, level with the Earth, and turn it on, pointed in a direction free of obstructions in the line of sight of the laser pointer.

Have your friend a couple towns over look up, make sure he is in line with the laser's beam, and have him measure its height above the ground. Also make sure you're both at the same height above sea level.

Now, I'm going to give you a moment to get yourself seated before I give you some fair warning, what you will see is going to completely blow your mind. The measurement your friend will return is going to be significantly higher than 2 meters! But you're both at the same height above sea level! How can this be, if the Earth is flat?!?

Simple answer is that it's simply not. If you send a camera up into space (Which you can do with a few thousand dollars nowadays), you can even take a picture of the Earth as it appears; a sphere.

Now, here's a slightly less practical experiment that you can try if you want to corroborate the ludicrous findings in the previous one. I want you to board an airplane heading East, make sure you're going to the same latitude as you're leaving from. Now, when you land there, take another plane heading East, again, making sure that you're landing at the same latitude. Do this until you find that your next plane ticket is for the place you took off from. But wait, how is this so? The Earth is flat, you can't circumnavigate it without coming to a sharp corner, and if you watched carefully, it was just smooth as far as the eye can see! Now, you may be thinking to yourself "Well IO just traveled around the rim of the disc!". Just to make sure, do it again, but with planes only going North, or as close as you can get to North. You'll notice the same effect! But that's impossible, no edges?!?

Now, I bet you'll assume that government spy satellites have been beaming false memories into your brain to make you think you didn't see any edges, but let's be honest here, the government doesn't have mind-altering satellites yet, come on, that's silly! Those go up in 2016.

When did you perform this experiment in order to give us the results?  Or, is this just a thought experiment that you are assuming the answer to? 

When did you perform this experiment in order to give us the results?  Or, is this just a thought experiment that you are assuming the answer to?
 

I have to agree with you on this one jroa.  Both of these "experiments" can't be more than of the "thought" kind, as both are far too complicated and costly to perform in the real world.  It's impossible—and illegal—for any civilian to use or possess a laser capable of projecting a distance of 200km for starters.  (I have a ruby one that has a range of 8km, and that's about it legally).  And the thousands of dollars in airfares makes the second experiment completely unrealistic—unless you happen to be a billionaire with money to burn LOL.

Any/all experiments proposed by round earthers must—at the very least—be capable of being performed with readily available equipment, and at virtually no cost beyond a bit of pocket money.

I do concur though with the thrust of Tethalamin's proposals, and agree that were they to be carried out, the results would in fact prove that the earth is spherical.

Alright, that last post was an outright troll on my part, I knew they were unfeasible. Here's a real one: Get on the phone with a friend at least several hundred kilometers East or West of you and measure the sun's height above the horizon, I believe a Sextant will do this for you, and I'm pretty sure there's a phone app that can do it. You could also use a piece of welder's glass (To shield your eyes from the sunlight), a yardstick, and something with a relatively fine point and adjustable height (Like a microphone stand with a pencil taped to the end). Make sure both of you are the same height above sea level.

Both of you will take measurements at roughly the same time, within a few seconds of each other optimally. You'll find that if your friend is East of you, the sun will appear lower on the horizon than it does to you, and vice versa if he is to the West.

Now, to corroborate this test with something that can easily be observed, take your microphone stand and stick a tennis ball or other round object to it, shine a flashlight on it from several feet away, and take two photographs with a camera or smartphone, one from the top of the ball, so the flashlight looks like it's just touching the surface of the ball, and one with the phone brought 5 degrees or so back, still perpendicular to the ball's surface, this picture will look like a sunset.

This test is easy to do, requires minimal resources and pretty conclusively proves that the Earth is a sphere, you'll find that the pictures and your observations will match up very closely. This is how the Greeks initially took a rough measurement of the circumference of the Earth over a thousand years ago, they were pretty close, so the method is reasonably accurate. With some trigonometry and a bit of quadratics, you could even replicate their test and measure the circumference of the Earth yourself.

Is that better?

If the sun circles the flat Earth, then it would be at different angles at different times of day in different locations.  Your experiment is very flawed. 

Quote from: FlatAllTheWay on August 29, 2014, 02:24:31 PM

Quote from: jroa on August 29, 2014, 09:29:06 AM

I messed up when I said pseudolites.  I was posting in several different threads at the same time.

What I was implying is that a light shooting across the sky could be anything at all.  You only assume it is a satellite because that is what they tell you it is.

Ok, so it's not a pseudolite.  So give us one -- just one! -- example of what it could be?

He obviously won't man. They could possibly be planes, but satellites seem to move slower. It moves way faster than a plane, but it just looks like it moves slower.

This sort of non-response is typical of jroa's behaviour whenever he's backed into a corner without an answer.  He simply walks away from the debate.  (As do a lot of his peers.)

He claims it's an incorrect "assumption" on our part that the moving lights are satellites solely because that's what "they" have told us.

But he can't define exactly why our assumption is wrong with any facts or figures—it's just his personal guess.  So in effect, he's claiming his "guess" is more likely to be correct than our science-based assumptions.  Which is obviously ludicrous.

He also fails to define who precisely "they" are.  Too many flat earthers claim "they" are responsible for any and/or everything the flat earthers can't explain—"they" are just like some indomitable force that distorts every science known to man, or are just a massive misinformation-generating machine.

So please don't hold your breath waiting for any sort of answer from jroa.  You'll be somewhat more than blue in the face before that happens LOL.

If the sun circles the flat Earth, then it would be at different angles at different times of day in different locations.  Your experiment is very flawed.

Since you claim that gravity does not exist, what mechanism makes the sun move as you claim it does?

If the sun circles the flat Earth, then it would be at different angles at different times of day in different locations.

It's apparent size would also change quite significantly, so....

If the sun circles the flat Earth, then it would be at different angles at different times of day in different locations.  Your experiment is very flawed.

'If'. Is there some doubt?

JROA: No it wouldn't. On a flat plane, the height of an orbiting body above the horizon (Note how I specified horizon in both this post and my last) will be the same regardless of your location. If you simply look at it, parallax will make it appear subjectively different, but with a measurement taken with non-stereoscopic equipment (to eliminate the error of parallax) it will be shown to be identical. This is not the case in reality.

I would also ask you to explain how a flat planet could possibly form given what we know about 3-dimensional spaaace and the nature of gravity. A flat planet is simply not possible, a combination of tidal forces and gravitational pressure would collapse it into a sphere rather easily. There's also the issue of high energy gamma detection, as well as rare instances of neutrinos being detected on both sides of the Earth, with a time delay between detections telling us hoe wide the oblate spheroid that is the Earth is at that point. We have fired things into the ground, and they came out on the other side of the Earth, we have done this in multiple locations perpendicular to each other and found that it's the same distance, so the Earth cannot be flat, nor can it be a cylinder because neither of those are shapes of constant or roughly constant width.

Explain these findings.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this is due to the distance the sun is from the Earth. Because of this distance, the amount the sun appears to "move" as a function of your location on Earth is minimal at any point in the evening because of the shallow angle between the horizon and the sun. There is also the fact that if the Earth were flat, you would see this movement in any direction of travel, and its procession across the sky according to your position would be linear, however, we do not find this, We find that its procession is logarithmic, because we are moving around a sphere, not across a plane. It's the reason that at higher latitudes it is possible to "keep up" with the sunset for a while. If the Earth were flat, then a sunset would last a fixed time regardless of your velocity.

I also have one more question: Why is it that nobody has ever seen the edge of the Earth if it's flat? We know exactly how big it is, people have flown all the way around it, why has there never been a single picture or report of the edge of the Earth? No government is able to suppress that kind of information so completely that not a single person has ever seen any of it, it's just not doable, especially considering the ideological differences between many nations, they just wouldn't cooperate.

And are you asking me to believe that this conspiracy has been going on since the ancient Greeks? Are you asking me to believe that the entire planet, save for Europe, was in on this conspiracy in a time when many nations weren't even aware that there were other places inhabited by humans? That's absolutely ludicrous! The concept of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is more credible than that!

And are you asking me to believe that this conspiracy has been going on since the ancient Greeks?
 

Unfortunately, this silly "conspiracy" theory of the flat earthers—such as jroa—is precisely what they'll claim as the source of we round earther's purported ignorance of the true geometry of the earth.  They'll in all seriousness claim that Pythagoras, Aristotle, and Eratosthenes were all early participants in this millennia-old conspiracy.  Although what motives would've prompted those guys to formulate a conspiracy is never explained by contemporary flat earthers.

When people with Loony Tunes notions lack any viable, empirical evidence for their pseudosciences, they invariably and inevitably ascribe this lack to a deliberately contrived "conspiracy" by some unbeknown and unnamed "powers that be".  The US government and NASA are the two most likely "suspects" but again, the flat earthers can't explain what exactly—in real, material terms—either of those two bodies would be gaining by persisting with the conspiracy if it existed.

Quote from: jroa on October 03, 2014, 05:40:59 AM

If the sun circles the flat Earth, then it would be at different angles at different times of day in different locations.

It's apparent size would also change quite significantly, so....

Atmospheric lensing could cause the sun to change apparent size as the amount of atmoplane changes between you and the sun. 

Quote from: JimmyTheCrab on October 04, 2014, 10:25:01 AM

Quote from: jroa on October 03, 2014, 05:40:59 AM

If the sun circles the flat Earth, then it would be at different angles at different times of day in different locations.

It's apparent size would also change quite significantly, so....

Atmospheric lensing could cause the sun to change apparent size as the amount of atmoplane changes between you and the sun.

But then so would everything else.  This does not happen. 

Quote from: jroa on October 06, 2014, 12:28:04 PM

Quote from: JimmyTheCrab on October 04, 2014, 10:25:01 AM

Quote from: jroa on October 03, 2014, 05:40:59 AM

If the sun circles the flat Earth, then it would be at different angles at different times of day in different locations.

It's apparent size would also change quite significantly, so....

Atmospheric lensing could cause the sun to change apparent size as the amount of atmoplane changes between you and the sun.

But then so would everything else.  This does not happen. 

Have you never heard of a mirage? 

Quote from: Rama Set on October 06, 2014, 01:38:11 PM

Quote from: jroa on October 06, 2014, 12:28:04 PM

Quote from: JimmyTheCrab on October 04, 2014, 10:25:01 AM

Quote from: jroa on October 03, 2014, 05:40:59 AM

If the sun circles the flat Earth, then it would be at different angles at different times of day in different locations.

It's apparent size would also change quite significantly, so....

Atmospheric lensing could cause the sun to change apparent size as the amount of atmoplane changes between you and the sun.

But then so would everything else.  This does not happen. 

Have you never heard of a mirage?

Off topic, please explain satellites with evidence.

Quote from: Rama Set on October 06, 2014, 01:38:11 PM

Quote from: jroa on October 06, 2014, 12:28:04 PM

Quote from: JimmyTheCrab on October 04, 2014, 10:25:01 AM

Quote from: jroa on October 03, 2014, 05:40:59 AM

If the sun circles the flat Earth, then it would be at different angles at different times of day in different locations.

It's apparent size would also change quite significantly, so....

Atmospheric lensing could cause the sun to change apparent size as the amount of atmoplane changes between you and the sun.

But then so would everything else.  This does not happen. 

Have you never heard of a mirage?

What known objects appear to get bigger as they move further away?

Atmospheric lensing could cause the sun to change apparent size as the amount of "atmoplane" changes between you and the sun.

I agree that atmospheric lensing can significantly deform our view of distant earth-objects.  This is a simple terrestrial example to illustrate the effect:


The left-hand is a schematic representation of the light ray paths from a car 15km distant from the observer—who "sees" the car's (multiple) headlight images as per the photo on the right.  (Captured in New Mexico, on the US60 highway near Magdalena.)

The point is though that all astronomical observations make allowances for this sort of effect by utilising established algorithms that correct the observational data, plus VLBI (Very-long-baseline interferometry).  When we talk about atmospheric lensing purely in layman's terms, we're normally talking about the effects as per the above image, rather than that of distant earth-objects.

Quote from: Rama Set on October 06, 2014, 01:38:11 PM

Quote from: jroa on October 06, 2014, 12:28:04 PM

Quote from: JimmyTheCrab on October 04, 2014, 10:25:01 AM

Quote from: jroa on October 03, 2014, 05:40:59 AM

If the sun circles the flat Earth, then it would be at different angles at different times of day in different locations.

It's apparent size would also change quite significantly, so....

Atmospheric lensing could cause the sun to change apparent size as the amount of atmoplane changes between you and the sun.

But then so would everything else.  This does not happen. 

Have you never heard of a mirage?

No, I haven't.  Could you take me through it and explain the relevance?