129 “Indeed, to
believe that ‘six thousand million million million tons’ is ‘rolling, surging,
flying, darting on through space for ever’ with a velocity compared with which
a shot from a cannon is a ‘very slow coach,’ with such unerring accuracy that a
telescope fixed on granite pillars in an observatory will not enable a
lynx-eyed astronomer to detect a variation in its onward motion of the
thousandth part of a hair's-breadth is to conceive a miracle compared with
which all the miracles on record put together would sink into utter
insignificance. Since we can, (in middle north latitudes), see the North Star,
on looking out of a window that faces it - and out of the very same corner of
the very same pane of glass in the very same window - all the year round, it is
proof enough for any man in his senses that we have made no motion at all and
that the Earth is not a globe.”
Quite remarkable. How does Carpenter (and Dubay) believe
that the Pole Star throws any doubt on the rotating spherical earth? He doesn’t
say. As so often, he makes an empty assertion with no reason given, so it’s not
possible to start to pick apart the confusion of his mind.
The pole star, Polaris
happens to be almost lined up with the current direction of the Northern
axis of rotation. Thus it appears not to move (by an amount that we can see
without careful study), unlike other stars that are off-axis. So what? That’s
exactly what we would expect in the scientific understanding.
Polaris’s position is changing very slowly, because of it’s
huge distance from Earth (433.8 light years) However, it’s apparent
position is moving as our sun moves through the vast distance of the galaxy.
In 3000 BCE, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star. At magnitude 3.67 (fourth
magnitude) it is only one-fifth as bright as Polaris, and today it is invisible
in light-polluted urban skies.
During the 1st millennium BCE, β Ursae Minoris was the bright
star closest to the celestial pole, but it was never close enough to be taken
as marking the pole, and the Greek navigator Pytheas in ca. 320 BCE described the celestial pole as
devoid of stars.
Gamma Cephei (also known as Alrai, situated 45 light-years
away) will become closer to the northern celestial pole than Polaris around
3000 CE. Iota Cephei will become the pole star some time around 5200
CE. First-magnitude Deneb will be within 5° of the North Pole in 10,000
CE.
There
is more on Polaris in other claims such as Point 98, and Point 150
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