Planetary retrograde motion

According to FE Wiki, the retrograde motion is explained by the planets orbiting the Sun while the Sun orbits the hub of the Earth. By that I assume it means the Sun follows a circular path centred over the north pole.

If that were the case though, wouldn't all planets show a full phase cycle?  Mercury and Venus show a full phase cycle, and that is fully explained by placing them nearer to the Sun in the heliocentric model. You never see a crescent Mars, Jupiter, Saturn though.

The FE Wiki is notoriously full of ideas from only one person's viewpoint, and cannot be considered reliable.

The FE can't explain how the sun would illuminate any celestial object due to the illumination needing to be vastly different for different people, and not matching the requirements at all for a full phase cycle.

In order to have a full phase cycle you need to have a time when the object is between you and the sun, a time when the object is to the side of you (relative to the line connecting you to the sun) and a time when you are between the object and the sun.
But as these objects are typically considered to be 5000 km above Earth, there is no way for them to be between you and the sun or for you to be between the sun and them.
So you could never have a full or new object.

Consider a "full moon", with the moon over the equator.
People north of the equator and south of the equator on the opposite side of Earth would get to see the majority of the moon illuminated. The further south on the other side, or north on the side with the moon, the fuller it would appear.
People south of the equator would be seeing the back side of the moon and see a new moon, or very little illuminated. The further south the less would be illuminated.
People directly below would see a half of the moon illuminated.

So it is actually far worse for the FE than you think.


Also related to the alleged FE solution is why just those planets? Why don't the stars also orbit the sun? Why not Earth as well or the moon as well? The sun and moon are roughly the same size, so why don't objects also orbit the moon? What causes the planets to orbit the sun in the first place?

It doesn't make sense at all. They seem to just be taking the scientific explanation for the retrograde motion and dumping it in to FE without a second thought for how or why it would work.

The FE Wiki is notoriously full of ideas from only one person's viewpoint, and cannot be considered reliable.

So it would seem. The section describing the Moon is also highly questionable.  The Moon 32 miles in diameter?  I don't think so..  and the FEW account regarding the lunar phases doesn't add up either.  Over a 24 hour period, everyone on Earth will see the same phase of the Moon regardless of where they are; NP, equator or SP. The % of the near (visible) side of the Moon which is illuminated by sunlight is changing all the time but only very slowly.

I have a home observatory and I have studied the Moons terminator through one of my longer focal length telescopes (gives a larger image scale and therefore higher magnifying power) at the time of first quarter for several hours to see what if any changes I can see in the visibility of the mountain tops. You can see the very tops of mountains just beyond the line of the terminator (line of lunar sunrise). Little difference has been noted.

If the FE theory is largely based around some 19th century guy who asserted that the best evidence for a flat Earth is a 6 mile long stretch of canal then there is a lot of work to do.  I guess Mr Rowbotham wasn't aware of (or simply ignored) the alternative explanations as to why he could see so far a long this canal.  Under the right atmospheric conditions you can see a lot further than 6 miles. 

FE'ers generally explain retrograde motion using the concept of epicycles along the lines of Tycho's geocentric model.  However, they seem to forget that Tycho's geocentic model is a round earth geocentric model and epicycles have not been demonstrated to work with a flat earth model.

Nothing surprises me anymore. I just wonder when the penny will drop so to speak and they will start to realise that nothing that they are claiming makes the slightest bit of sense.  For example what physical evidence is there out there in the real world that even suggests it is flat?

In mainstream science for example we are continually resting and retesting theories and model with experiment and observation and then from the results we say 'it could be this, or it could be that...'  In FE they see something like a flat horizon and just conclude from that the Earth is flat without considering any other possible alternatives.  For example if the world is a sphere then the horizon will still appear flat to a fixed observer at ground level so how does that prove the Earth is flat?

Since the most common solar model of the flat earth has the Sun traveling in a circle that gradually changes radius on a yearly cycle, with no explanation of how that is consistent with any model of forces, there should be no issue with the retrograde motion (or any motion, really, of any object) as it is observed to be an inherent property of how that object moves. Planets apparently just turn around and go the other way sometimes. Why is that something that needs explaining?

Why is that something that needs explaining?

Because any model to try and describe the world should have an explanation for things.

If you compare 2 models (or more), where one has an actual explanation while the other just says "that is how things are", which one is more likely to be correct and more likely to be accepted by rational people?

Quote from: Curiouser and Curiouser on October 30, 2019, 10:39:57 AM

Why is that something that needs explaining?

Because any model to try and describe the world should have an explanation for things.

If you compare 2 models (or more), where one has an actual explanation while the other just says "that is how things are", which one is more likely to be correct and more likely to be accepted by rational people?

If the Sun's motion is accepted as fact, the planets' motion (the topic of this thread) is no more problematic and unexplanable.

Quote

The FE Wiki is notoriously full of ideas from only one person's viewpoint, and cannot be considered reliable.

So it would seem. The section describing the Moon is also highly questionable.  The Moon 32 miles in diameter?  I don't think so..  and the FEW account regarding the lunar phases doesn't add up either.  Over a 24 hour period, everyone on Earth will see the same phase of the Moon regardless of where they are; NP, equator or SP. The % of the near (visible) side of the Moon which is illuminated by sunlight is changing all the time but only very slowly.

I have a home observatory and I have studied the Moons terminator through one of my longer focal length telescopes (gives a larger image scale and therefore higher magnifying power) at the time of first quarter for several hours to see what if any changes I can see in the visibility of the mountain tops. You can see the very tops of mountains just beyond the line of the terminator (line of lunar sunrise). Little difference has been noted.

If the FE theory is largely based around some 19th century guy who asserted that the best evidence for a flat Earth is a 6 mile long stretch of canal then there is a lot of work to do.  I guess Mr Rowbotham wasn't aware of (or simply ignored) the alternative explanations as to why he could see so far a long this canal.  Under the right atmospheric conditions you can see a lot further than 6 miles.

and don't forget, water flows downhill, and out of the canal, what is the change in elevation, of it's start to end? PS: you are looking downhill.

Quote from: Nucleosynthesis on October 29, 2019, 01:38:19 PM

If the FE theory is largely based around some 19th century guy who asserted that the best evidence for a flat Earth is a 6 mile long stretch of canal then there is a lot of work to do.  I guess Mr Rowbotham wasn't aware of (or simply ignored) the alternative explanations as to why he could see so far a long this canal.  Under the right atmospheric conditions you can see a lot further than 6 miles.

and don't forget, water flows downhill, and out of the canal, what is the change in elevation, of it's start to end? PS: you are looking downhill.

I think, but I might be wrong, that the water in the Bedford Canal is often stationary.

Quote from: MouseWalker on October 31, 2019, 01:49:55 PM

Quote from: Nucleosynthesis on October 29, 2019, 01:38:19 PM

If the FE theory is largely based around some 19th century guy who asserted that the best evidence for a flat Earth is a 6 mile long stretch of canal then there is a lot of work to do.  I guess Mr Rowbotham wasn't aware of (or simply ignored) the alternative explanations as to why he could see so far a long this canal.  Under the right atmospheric conditions you can see a lot further than 6 miles.

and don't forget, water flows downhill, and out of the canal, what is the change in elevation, of it's start to end? PS: you are looking downhill.

I think, but I might be wrong, that the water in the Bedford Canal is often stationary.

The main purpose of the Bedford canal was for drainage, sow the land could be farmed. Stationary water become stagnant and unhealthy.

Regardless of what the canal was built for, how does this experiment on its own prove the Earth is flat?   Just because Rowbotham said so?

Quote from: rabinoz on October 31, 2019, 02:46:22 PM

I think, but I might be wrong, that the water in the Bedford Canal is often stationary.

The main purpose of the Bedford canal was for drainage, sow the land could be farmed. Stationary water become stagnant and unhealthy.

Wikipedia says slow flowing so I wasn't quite right.

Bedford Level experiment

The Bedford Level experiment is a series of observations carried out along a six-mile (9.7 km) length of the Old Bedford River on the Bedford Level of the Cambridgeshire Fens in the United Kingdom, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, to measure the curvature of the Earth. Samuel Birley Rowbotham, who conducted the first observations starting in 1838, claimed he had proven the Earth to be flat. However, in 1870, after adjusting Rowbotham's method to avoid the effects of atmospheric refraction, Alfred Russel Wallace found a curvature consistent with a spherical Earth.

The Bedford Level
At the point chosen for all the experiments, the river is a slow-flowing drainage canal running in an uninterrupted straight line for a six-mile (9.7 km) stretch to the north-east of the village of Welney. This makes it an ideal location to directly measure the curvature of the Earth.