[Ratboy]

One particularly special day, travelling in a car with kids we played a game called "water or mirage?"  The roads were wet but it was sunny.  We would come up to a shiny spot on the road and we each guessed mirage or water.  It was pretty much 50/50 and sometimes it was both.  But just like the sun at sunset, it is neat how mirages get smaller until they suddenly poof away at the end.  Air is not perfectly invisible and it will make for optical illusions.  But watching sunsets, it would be near impossible to decide if our round earth is orbiting the sun or the sun is orbiting our round earth.  But once you think about it, how likely is it that this huge ball of gas is spinning around our earth once a day at 24 million miles an hour?  More likely we are spinning at once a day and going around the sun at 65,000 miles an hour.  The smaller thing probably orbits the bigger thing.

[Rounder]

You’re right, but don’t forget that FE folks think the sun is only 32 miles across, meaning they DO have the “smaller thing” moving relative to the “bigger thing”

[Ratboy]

Using my guesses at distances when the sun was directly overhead at Concepcion and I was in the Arctic, I get a distance to the sun of 1.8 million miles.  Since I can approximately block the sun with my finger at arm's length, it is about 0.5 of a degree of my line of sight.  That gives it a diameter of 16,000 miles.  I obviously did not measure things right and the snowmobile was probably going faster than my guess.
Anyway, I leave it to others to get a better guess at the distance to the sun based on what we can see.  I am confident it will be big and far away.  Even the ancients knew the moon was much closer than the sun and since they are approximately the same size when viewed from earth, the sun must be a lot bigger than the moon.