Wednesday 9 March 2016

98) “NASA and modern astronomy say Polaris, the North Pole star, is somewhere between 323-434 light years, or about 2 quadrillion miles, away from us! Firstly, note that is between 1,938,000,000,000,000 - 2,604,000,000,000,000 miles making a difference of 666,000,000,000,000 (over six hundred trillion) miles! If modern astronomy cannot even agree on the distance to stars within hundreds of trillions of miles, perhaps their “science” is flawed and their theory needs re-examining. However, even granting them their obscurely distant stars, it is impossible for heliocentrists to explain how Polaris manages to always remain perfectly aligned straight above the North Pole throughout Earth’s various alleged tilting, wobbling, rotating and revolving motions.

Mr Dubay believes things based purely on faith – perhaps in religion, more often it seems in his own cleverness. 

Then he rationalises and picks out, or makes up, supposed evidence to support his predetermined, irrational conclusions. He doesn’t understand science enough to disagree with it in a rational manner, as I’ve demonstrated repeatedly here. 

So not surprisingly, he, and those who follow him don’t find any need to change their minds. If new evidence comes along to challenge there beliefs, they just say “its’ a conspiracy” and deny it. And they don’t even understand why that undermines their claims to be rational.

But science is based on reasoning, observation, research and inference to the best explanation. As a result, it changes, refines and improves its findings, unlike the results of fixed dogma.
And here is an example. You have not pointed to a weakness of science, Mr Dubay, but to a great strength.

For more about this story, read this:


More on this claim:

Incomprehension of methods + false claim

Concerning the often cited "wobbling and spiraling": See#128. 

Now why is it that astronomers sometimes do not have exact values for our distances to the stars? Well maybe because it's friggin HARD to do these measurements precisely. Measuring stellar parallax at 430 light years distance, you have to detect a shift due to an orbital movement of 1.5*10
 km at a distance of 430*9.46*10¹²km. That gives you an angle of α=arctan(1.5*10⁻⁴/(9.46*430))*3600 = 7.6*10⁻³ arcseconds.

After a full orbit of earth you get twice that value, which is (=α*2/3600):

0.0000042°

That’s the star’s apparent movement that you observe and measure, that’s what we’re talking about here. Try to measure that! Even if your measuring device has a margin of error of just 0.0000001°, it can give you a wrong result by more than 10 light years in this example. It’s just hard to do this. When you combine different methods of measurement you will be able to get values that are more and more refined and exact. And that’s exactly what astronomers are doing.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_parallax



Even if you looked at the closest stars in our immediate neighborhood (like Proxima Centauri), which are said to be more than 4 light years away (4*10¹³ km roughly), the parallax measurement is the equivalent of looking at an object that is 4 km away while shifting your observing position back and forth by 
 4*3*10 km / 4*10¹³ km = 0.00003 km = 3 cm   (for a full orbit of earth with around 3*10 km.)

You just can't perceive this with your bare eyes, but with a precise and delicate measurement using a good telescope you definitely can. 

Here's an example of what parallaxes would look like over the course of one year if the earth's orbit was much larger than it is (around 1.5 light-years in diameter, i.e. 50,000 times larger):



 http://www.astronexus.com/node/29

That means in reality this motion is fifty thousand times weaker (and of course slower). That's why you cannot possibly see stellar parallax with your naked eyes. That's why it is very hard to do and was absolutely impossible until the advent of telescopes. But today we have them in abundance and for the nearest stars it is now possible to make these kinds of measurements even with regular backyard-telescopes.

Parallax angle for Proxima Centauri is 0.768 arcseconds. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri

How much of a fortune costs a telescope that can resolve 0.77''? A brand new 6-inch Dobsonian telescope sells for 300 bucks and less, see here:


So please keep in mind, there is a difference between "hard" and "impossible". ;-) 

"Polaris manages to always remain perfectly aligned straight above the North Pole throughout Earth’s various alleged tilting, wobbling, rotating and revolving motions ".

No it doesn't. Every single night it can be observed describing a small circle around the celestial pole with a radius of 0.7°. If you don't bother looking up, it can already be clearly and unmistakenly seen in a high-resolved and long-exposure photograph: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polaris#Role_as_pole_star


Do you see the small and bright arc close to the center of rotation? That is Polaris.


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