Unfortunately, that isn't even close to the result that Rowbotham got when he tried a similar experiment in England.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/earth/za/za23.htm#page_99
That was an interesting read. Thanks for the link.
I doubt if the experiment were repeated competently with at least twentieth-century instruments and timekeeping the results would be the same. The reported 3-degree difference in the measured altitude angle is much larger than one would expect for locations only 50 miles apart, and, using his results, places the sun directly overhead in central France. Did anyone on the Northern Mediterranean Coast notice the Sun being north of them at midday that summer? It seems like we would have heard of it from
someone if it had been there.
Presuming experimental error in Mr. Rowbotham's measurements and using a more realistic 0.7 degree difference in altitude for these locations (Stellarium predicts 60.0 and 60.7 degrees to the bottom of the sun at culmination from the two cited locations on July 13 this year), and using the
Law of Sines we get 3544 and 3569 miles slant-line distances to the bottom of the sun from Brighton and London, respectively. Multiplying 3569 miles by the sine of 60 degrees (altitude angle from London) gives a height of 3091 miles above the presumed-flat earth, and 3569 miles by the cosine of 60 degrees gives a horizontal distance of 1785 miles from london to the point on the flat earth directly under the sun, somewhere near the middle of modern-day Algeria. Hey, at least it's on the right continent!
I recognize that
Stellarium uses Heliocentric and spheroidal-earth models, but, without going into whether or not those are truly correct, it consistently produces
very accurate values for the apparent positions of celestial objects. It should be easy enough to measure this for yourselves if you don't want to rely on a simulation.
And, indeed, as already noted, there is no compensation applied in the experiment as described for the "bendy light" necessary to produce a sunset. The flat-earth model as described is terribly inconsistent with itself. Thoughts, anyone?
So, let's see... one model produces results that routinely check out against actual observations while another, considering experiments designed and described by its author, is not even consistent with itself. Which would
you choose, and why?