Watching Mercury today

On Saturday, January 26, 2019 at 4:01:38 PM UTC-7, Mike Collins wrote:

How have you managed to miss his years of vilifying Newton for stating that
from the Sun there are no retrogrades?

It's true he does that, but that doesn't mean what you think it means.

His complaint is that Newton is expressing the truth given us by Copernicus in
an invalid way, because he drags in an "imaginary observer".

Thus, he takes another statement by Newton, and a virtually identical one by
Kepler, and says that Newton's statement is bad while Kepler's statement is
good. He is not disputing the phenomena, but instead the mind-set that views the
Solar System as a physical system... and a few other things that even I have not
yet been able to comprehend.

John Savard

On Sunday, January 27, 2019 at 3:39:57 AM UTC-7, Quadibloc wrote:

His complaint is that Newton is expressing the truth given us by Copernicus in
an invalid way, because he drags in an "imaginary observer".

Basically, his position could be stated as "Reference frames considered harmful",
presumably because he doesn't understand them. So he is a Copernican, but he
limits the ways in which Copernicanism can be legitimately explained.

John Savard

I am mindful of the people who tried to deal with the shift in perspective from an Earth centred system to a moving Earth in a Sun centred system.

Given the initial complexity involved in discerning the faster moving planets seen from a slower Earth moving in a wider orbital circumference, no fault is assigned to the first Sun centred astronomers who were trying to combine two separate issues in astronomy that do not fit together. These astronomers worked exclusively with the motion of the planets against the background stars however the back and forth motions of the faster planets which include direct/retrogrades are referenced to the stationary Sun.

Long before anyone responsible here recognised the solution, it has gained acceptance in the wider world as both enjoyable and common sense, however, without a total package which includes how a satellite provides observations solely from an orbital perspective where the Sun is central to observation it is going to generate the same problems faced by the original astronomers.

Perhaps getting rid of direct/retrograde language altogether is helpful as we are now just acknowledging how we see the planets move around differently from our relative motion and position within the solar system. In the event of a telescope on Mars, the Earth becomes a faster moving planet with the same traits we currently see of Venus and Mercury.

http://images6.fanpop.com/image/phot...-2560-1440.jpg

Isn't it something to celebrate that we can look out in the direction of the Sun and know that these events are taking place close to the Sun even though the glare and daily rotation tends to obscure it -

https://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data...current_c3.gif

There is little to gain in pointing out historical experience in these matters in terms of the delay making it into wider circulation insofar as the innovations are entirely technological or engineering so the observer arrives at the astronomical events through satellite timelapse. Even I do not have to scramble anymore to put observations in context thereby leaving the imaging to dictate the narrative for those who are interested.

Sin a bhfuil le rá