On 19/10/2018 06:35, Gerald Kelleher wrote:
On Thursday, October 18, 2018 at 8:30:01 PM UTC+1, Mike Collins
wrote:


This shows that Augustine, unlike you understood that circumpolar
rotation is the true rotation of the Earth. All he needed to leap
right past your limited and warped understanding was an accurate
clock.

The danger of Royal Society empiricism , much like Brexit, is it
emerged from the university subculture in Britain and no appeal to
reason will change their blinkered attitude as they bluff and bluster
their way.

The Royal Society is concerned with the study or real science and cares
nothing about your inarticulate emotional rantings on the subject.

Brexit was caused by a bunch of power crazed pathological liars writing
a big slogan on the side of a bus that too many of the wilfully ignorant
in the UK were dumb enough to believe. The chickens are coming home to
roost now as Brexit proves to be impossible to deliver. Brexit proves
that Turkeys really will vote for Christmas if suitably motivated.

Brexit might have got off to a better start if they had chosen someone
capable of actually negotiating unlike Donald Duck (aka David Davis) and
the choice of blustering baffoon Boris Johnson for Foreign Secretary who
made us a laughing stock. The only thing they have is the lame slogan
"Brexit means Brexit" with 5 months still to go. Brexit balls up!

A person capable of using their intelligence will recognise that the
RA/Dec framework is in competition with the Lat/Long system for the
basic answer to the question 'How long does it take the Earth to turn
once ?'.

They are just different coordinate systems for answering different
questions on a sphere. One allows you to predict where to find a
position on the Earth and the other where to find a star in the sky.

Why do you have so much difficulty in understanding that the fixed stars
represent a very fundamental reference frame for all of astronomy?

(Hipparchos has managed to measure the proper motions and parallaxes of
around 100000 of the closer stars but the most distant objects are truly
very very fixed reference points - the best ones are quasars for VLBI).

--
Regards,
Martin Brown