On May 11, 9:34*am, oriel36 wrote:

How intelligent does a person need to be to see that extending the
Earth's spherical geometry *into the celestial arena *via a calendar
driven Ra/Dec convention and without any qualifiers whatsoever will
produce a celestial sphere geometry ?.

It is true that when we talk about directions from the Earth, these
directions form a "celestial sphere". But this does not mean that
using such a construct implies we must believe in a literal firmament,
and deny that the distant galaxies are much farther away than the near
stars. The possible directions away from the Earth correspond to the
points on a sphere; such a correspondence does not require an actual
sphere to exist.

Whatever drives people to believe that daily rotation to a stationary
celestial sphere does not retain the architecture of the apparent
motion about Polaris I do not know, but using a celestial sphere to
justify daily rotation has consequences which close to being a
dishonorable to human intelligence as it is possible to get -

You may have your rhetoric, but this is not seen.

In order to retain daily rotation to a rotating celestial sphere as
the reference for everything in the Universe and subsequently
rotational orientation to Polaris,they had to introduce a wandering
analemma Sun to blur the original distinction between daily rotation
and its true reference - natural noon.

Natural noon, as you point out, is unequal in the duration from one
natural noon to the next because of the Equation of Time.

The Earth's orbital motion is the source of that inequality, as you
yourself stated in a recent post:

(begin quote)
The natural noon benchmark which creates the seamless transition from
one 24 hour day to the next contains the natural inequalities which
arising from the orbital motion of the Earth.
(end quote)

If we try to refer the unequal natural noon to a 24-hour uniform
rotation, then the result would be the cosmology of Tycho Brahe,
*with* a "wandering analemma Sun"; absent orbital motion of the Earth
around the Sun, the Sun would have to wiggle around in an actual
motion corresponding to the shape of the analemma.

But the Sun does not do this - it remains at the center, and the Earth
moves around the Sun in an orbit.

If we consider the Earth'a axial rotation _from the same perspective_
as the Earth's orbit, we see the uniform axial rotation which when
combined with the Earth's orbital motion yields the complicated
compound motion that is natural noon.

This is simple, clear, and straightforward. It does not insult human
intelligence; it reflects the thinking of Copernicus and Kepler. Only
your own confusion leads you to think otherwise.

Call it what you will,a nightmare or a crisis,

Ah, yes, the old headline trick:

Isaac Newton: threat or menace?

John Savard