On Friday, January 4, 2019 at 6:13:02 PM UTC, palsing wrote:
At my age I can't be easily bullied.

At your age you should already know what you don't know, but you don't... and there is a LOT that you don't know.

Of course, there is a LOT that I don't know, the difference being that I am well aware of it.

I tell you what the world knows now -

"Put more plainly, pretend you're Earth, watching Mercury run around a track. As it runs its loop, it will start out moving from the left side of your field of vision to your right. Then, it rounds the corner and, although not moving backward, is now running from right to left. This analogy is oversimplified because it doesn't take into account the fact that Earth is also moving, but it gives a good idea of how this optical illusion plays out. All of the planets exhibit apparent retrograde motion, although it plays out slightly differently for planets farther from the sun than Earth versus those, like Mercury, that are closer to the sun than Earth." CBS news

To be fair to whoever wrote that piece, they are deficient when judging "slightly differently" as the direct/retrograde motions or the actual looping motions of Venus and Mercury are entirely different to the illusory loops of the slower moving planets for reasons that were given here over the years..

Considering that direct/retrograde motions haven't been touched since Copernicus first accounted for the motions of the slower moving planets, I take great satisfaction in partitioning the perspectives that the wider world is beginning to accept.

In case people doubt that the original Sun centred astronomers made the distinction, there is always Galileo and Kepler to demonstrate that they didn't -

"Now what is said here of Jupiter is to be understood of Saturn and Mars also. In Saturn these retrogressions are somewhat more frequent than in Jupiter, because its motion is slower than Jupiter's, so that the Earth overtakes it in a shorter time. In Mars they are rarer, its motion being faster than that of Jupiter, so that the Earth spends more time in catching up with it. Next, as to Venus and Mercury, whose circles are included within that of the Earth, stoppings and retrograde motions appear in them also, due not to any motion that really exists in them, but to the annual motion of the Earth. This is acutely demonstrated by Copernicus . . ." Galileo