IF the earth was flat.
And IF there was a dome.
And IF there was a horizon.
Where do the stars come from and go to when they rise and set on the horizon ?
Well, the Babylonians (and a number of other ancient civilisations)
- Believed that the earth was flat.
- Accepted a sort of "dome", though they called it the celestial sphere and had it rotate about (sort of orbit) their flat earth.
- Accepted that there was a horizon.
- And accepted that the sun, moon, planets and stars rose from and set behind the horizon.
But they was a catch.
Their flat earth was small and their sun rose from and set into
the underworld, Hades.
Some civilisations, the Chinese, I think, had the sun rising from and setting into the sea.
The Babylonian region was
small enough tobe reasonably called flat.
A few might remember
Daddy and this is from his opening post:
. . . . . . . .
Now we have a flat Earth fitting all observations. Stars can indeed revolve sideways when seen from anywhere around the Equator, we can predict the sun and moon's positions, etc, as we would obtain something like this:
. . . . . . . .
Imagine the little Globe inside that
Celestial Sphere, replaced by the small flat earth of the Babylonian region and you might see a
locally flat earth that did indeed explain most of out celestial observations.
This can explain why the Babylonians, even being "flat earth believers", could have laid the basis for much of our astronomical observations.
They are even to
blame for the 12's, 60's and 360's we find scattered through our time and angle measurements.
They started out thinking that there we 360 days in the year and did arithmetic to base-60 (

how many fingers and toes did they have?

)
So, maybe someone can explain where why these Neo-Flat-Earthers went so wrong in having the sun, moon, planets and stars circle above their flat earth.
Why did the flat earth work for these ancient people, yet now fails so miserably?
PS: The above is a gross simplification and not necessarily correct in all details.
It is just meant to convey that a locally flat earth can explain what we observe.