Thank you for taking the time to offer the well-presented argument. It is very true that the southern star trails present a conundrum that most in the FE community do not know how to account for. To be sure, as one delves into comparing a heliocentric model to a stationary model (be it geocentric or “flat”), one will find that many measurements/observations work in both models, and some measurements/observations fail in one or the other, with none being perfect.
For the heliocentric model, new scientific explanations are ”discovered“ and added post-hoc throughout the centuries to make the model work. Add a tilt here, a elliptical path there, a wobble in other places, and this is how we come to “know“ our heliocentric world that we were raised in.
Again, we do not yet understand enough of the alternative cosmology to know what correctly may be added to account for it, which is to say that we, with humility, cannot sometimes know why things appear to work in one model but not in another...until we do. But, again, alternative cosmologists do not get the privilege of inventing things such as gravity, tidal lock, and dark matter, to justify their models.
Nevertheless, I present the following phenomena, but don’t presume to understand all of it.
I will start by sharing that I have spent many a night under the stars staring up, as one of my hobbies is in fact astrophotography. I have noticed that photos of the night sky do not properly account for naked eye observation, as there are many things to account for when we observe with stereoscopic vision versus a flat photographic rendering.
I won’t try to go too deep into it, but consider a few empirical concepts regarding vision. When we look as far in one direction and then another, we are not viewing a totality of “viewable” night sky, but rather two separate vanishing points going in each direction. This causes a warping in our viewable peripherals that we don’t consciously account for and that photography ignores. Even more, we almost never consider a vertical vanishing point, which is what accounts for a fish-eye effect in photography.
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Take the following photo for example (not original work). Even though we often see a nice arch when viewing a picture of what we call the milky way’s dark rift, it actually and in reality stretches from one vanishing point from your observable left and to another to your right in a straight path. Matter of fact, when I lay on the ground and look straight up at it, I can trick my brain with my vision and cause that band of light to bend in the opposite direction of the curve you see in the photo, merely by looking at it “upside-down”, while laying down on my back.
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Add a rotating dome to the observation and it’s hard to lock down what’s really going on, in spite of what a flat and 2-dimensional long-exposure photograph tries to “inform” us (in regard to any actual overhead movement that may be occurring). I say a rotating dome because that is how we view the sky, and planetariums do conform to a dome to be able to render a simulation commensurate with our view. Again, photography is not an accurate form of documenting empirical spatial observations of 3D space. It’s about as subjective and imperfect as one can get, in actuality.
But, again to get back to trying to the head-scratching phenomena that we observe in southern star trails, I offer the following. First, observable star movement and star trails offer anomalous and unresolved issues in each of the models which i will not go deep into here, but the goal is to try to at least directly answer the “how coulds“ for one model or the other.
In regard to the southern rotation see by looking south from any point in the southern hemisphere, the argument against a flat earth model (using an azimuthal equidistant “AE” model as a general representation for the FE model) is that “it would be impossible” for anyone looking south to observe any circular rotation.
However, there has been an interesting observation presented, using a half-dome magnifying glass. Placing the curved glass over a star-trail representation does cause some interesting warping and apparent circular rotation at its edges, which on a AE map would indeed represent the southern “polar” directions.
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To be sure, I’m not claiming to know whether there is a dome firmament above us and whether or not starlight from outside of it is being refracted inward, but if we use that as an hypothesis, an interesting phenomenon does seem to present itself, that may be commensurate of what we may be observing in reality.
Again, I do not presume to understand or know the answer, but I do feel that there is a case for reasonable doubt. Thank you again for presenting the southern star trails problem as it is an important one.
you
