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Flat Earth Theory / The Day/Night Cycle and Centripetal Acceleration

« on: August 07, 2017, 12:53:05 AM »

The day/night cycle on the wiki has the sun and the moon revolving around the midpoint between them. This would make sense in the context of "celestial gravitation" where they both pull on each other. However, this clearly can't be temporally universal as the solar eclipse later this month will demonstrate. If the day/night cycle as outlined on the wiki is to continue, the sun must continue to travel in a circular manner. From whence would the centripetal acceleration of the sun come from during a solar eclipse on a flat earth?

2

Flat Earth Theory / Solar Irradiance

« on: August 04, 2017, 02:01:14 AM »

To avoid a wall of text, I'm going to provide just enough background information to frame my question about the FE model. Should the details of how I got the following numbers be desired, just let me know.

In the RE model, the Sun is a blackbody radiator 1.496×10^8 km from earth with a surface temperature of about 5770K and a radius of 695,700 km. It's Luminosity is about 3.828×10^26 Watts. The irradiance at the top of the Earth's atmosphere is about 1363 W/m^2.

Using FE's distance to the sun of 3000 miles (4828 km) and the Sun's known angular size of about 0.5°, it has a radius of about 22.45 km. Using this, the Stefan-Boltzman law, and the 4828 km, the FE model has the same irradiance when the sun is overhead (1363 W/m^2).

However, the irradiance varies considerably when not overhead. For example, say the sun is overhead in Miami around noon, and it's around 9am in Las Angeles 3763 km away. Assume clear skies in both cities. At that distance, line of site distance from LA to the sun is about 6121 km. Because radiation drops as an inverse square of the distance, normal incident irradiance in a vacuum at LA would be about 847.9 W/m^2. But in reality there is still an atmosphere, and the radiation has to travel through even more of it. Assuming the same ratio of atmospheric loss though (1000/1363), the ballpark number would be around 622 W/m^2.

Irradiance does not vary this much in reality. Take for example data from normal incident pyrheliometers in Albuquerque, New Mexico on a clear day. The direct irradiance at 9am does not drop much lower than 1000 W/m^2 at noon (last figure on the website):
http://www.powerfromthesun.net/Book/chapter02/chapter02.html

How does the FE model account for this?