On Saturday, May 19, 2018 at 9:33:19 AM UTC-6, wrote:

Unfortunately for Gerald, it shows illusory loops in the paths of Venus and
Mercury, showing that this thread is just him imagining he understands things
again.

The "illusory" loops sure look like Mercury and Venus going around the Sun,
which is what they "really" do.

What I'm getting here is that people are jumping on Oriel for his usual mistake:

that is, just as he says that the Moon doesn't rotate, and the Earth rotates
once very 24 hours, not every 23 hours and 56 minutes,

you're acting *as if* he had said that Mercury orbits the Sun, not once every 88
days, but instead once every 115.88 days.

He hasn't, yet, made that false assertion. Maybe you see this as implied by his
statements that the loops are real - if (he says that) they're due to Mercury's
real orbital motion around the Sun, then (he must mean that) they must be
_solely_ due to its real orbital motion around the Sun, without contamination
from our changing point of view on Earth.

Basically, I see Oriel as speaking in general, qualitative terms at this point:
and thus, what he has said so far is right. What he might say later may be
wrong. So my reaction is that for people to be pouncing on him in advance....
would risk confusing him more than he is confused already. If, that is, he
actually listened to anyone else, so I think we're safe.

The basic idea, that a planet's orbit as seen from the Earth is a circle with loops in it, but in the case of the superior planets, the overall circle is the result of the planet's orbit, and the loops reflect the Earth's motion, and thus are illusions... while in the case of the inferior planets, the overall circle is the result of the Earth's motion giving the Sun an apparent orbit around the Earth, while the loops are the effect of those planets' actual orbit around the Sun... is true and correct.

That Oriel claims this as a new insight peculiar to himself is, of course, a
mistake: but by reacting to his statement as though it were a mistake _confirms_
that belief, since if it was something that you knew all along, you wouldn't be
saying it was wrong!

John Savard