Anyone who cares to read the words of the original heliocentrists such
as Copernicus,Kepler,Rheticus never find them critical of the Ptolemy
* and only criticise his followers for their methods.Like all
empiricists whoes means of defence is to personally attack a
person,Newton's ideas set the benchmark -


"This is the story of a scientific crime. ... I mean a crime committed
by a scientist against fellow scientists and scholars, a betrayal of
the ethics and integrity of his profession that has forever deprived
mankind of fundamental information about an important area of astronomy
and history. ....[Ptolemy] developed certain astronomical theories and
discovered that they were not consistent with observation. Instead of
abandoning the theories, he deliberately fabricated observations from
the theories so that he could claim that the observations prove the
validity of his theories. In every scientific or scholarly setting
known, this practice is called fraud, and it is a crime against science
and scholarship. " Newton

The only fraud I know of was the misconduct of the same accusatory
figure above who hammered planetary motion into a celestial
sphere/calendar system but like all dull and dreary people like
that,their works only highlight how silly and pretensious they are.

I love the original insights of Copernican heliocentricity and its
later refinements too much to see them misused by people who are only
interested in the convenience of the Ra/Dec plotting system,a system
which tethers planetary motion to the stellar background rather than
frees it,something even Ptolemy had done.

As for you all,well there is no absolution for a wasted life,like the
creationists who try to promote God (and I am a Christian) they do more
damage than good.So it is with this present era of optical astronomers.






* http://homepages.wmich.edu/~mcgrew/chain.htm