One thing I should mention where I wasn’t able to get a very good match between my own observations and mainstream science.
The Sun and the Moon are very, very close in their apparent diameter in the sky. They are almost exactly the same size. You can measure them yourself and compare, although this is a bit fiddly; I certainly got well within my own measurement errors, although those errors were large. However, you can verify it very easily and directly at the time of solar eclipses. They are so near in size that the wobbliness of the Moon’s orbit means that sometimes the Sun is just-smaller than the Moon (when you get a total eclipse) and sometimes it is just-bigger (when you get an annular eclipse).
But they are very, very different in their actual size, and in their distance from the Earth. In Father Ted terms, the Moon is small and close; the Sun is large and far away. In rough terms, the Moon is 400,000 km away and 3,400 km across, and the Sun is 150m km away and 1.4m km across. You don’t have to change any one of those four measurements much for them to be quite different apparent sizes from the Earth. Indeed, if you do the calculations (which I can personally attest to), if you go back far enough in time they weren’t the same apparent size, and nor are they if you go forward a long way in to the future.
Why? Why this coincidence? And why is it only happening at just the times when humans are around to observe it?
So far as I know, we have no good theories apart from “it just happened to work out that way”. This is pretty unsatisfying.
There are so many possible coincidences, it would be surprising if none of them happened.
I observed 2012 transit of Venus, right on schedule.
Don’t know an easy way to prove changing earth-moon distance, but changes in speed of earth’s rotation can be seen as changes in number of days per year, visible in growth layers in fossil coral. Taking a magnifying glass to the right museum might allow individual verification. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v197/n4871/abs/197948a0.html
One thing I should mention where I wasn’t able to get a very good match between my own observations and mainstream science.
The Sun and the Moon are very, very close in their apparent diameter in the sky. They are almost exactly the same size. You can measure them yourself and compare, although this is a bit fiddly; I certainly got well within my own measurement errors, although those errors were large. However, you can verify it very easily and directly at the time of solar eclipses. They are so near in size that the wobbliness of the Moon’s orbit means that sometimes the Sun is just-smaller than the Moon (when you get a total eclipse) and sometimes it is just-bigger (when you get an annular eclipse).
But they are very, very different in their actual size, and in their distance from the Earth. In Father Ted terms, the Moon is small and close; the Sun is large and far away. In rough terms, the Moon is 400,000 km away and 3,400 km across, and the Sun is 150m km away and 1.4m km across. You don’t have to change any one of those four measurements much for them to be quite different apparent sizes from the Earth. Indeed, if you do the calculations (which I can personally attest to), if you go back far enough in time they weren’t the same apparent size, and nor are they if you go forward a long way in to the future.
Why? Why this coincidence? And why is it only happening at just the times when humans are around to observe it?
So far as I know, we have no good theories apart from “it just happened to work out that way”. This is pretty unsatisfying.
There are so many possible coincidences, it would be surprising if none of them happened.
I observed 2012 transit of Venus, right on schedule.
Don’t know an easy way to prove changing earth-moon distance, but changes in speed of earth’s rotation can be seen as changes in number of days per year, visible in growth layers in fossil coral. Taking a magnifying glass to the right museum might allow individual verification.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v197/n4871/abs/197948a0.html
Keep in mind that the earth-moon distance is not constant. The moon appeared larger in the past and will appear smaller in the future.