[timterroo]

Last week, the comet "Neowise" was visible from my location. I could see it each night in the western sky.

One observation I made was that its position relative to mine changed with the passing of time - it appeared to drop on the horizon, as would be expected, as the earth rotated away from it toward the east.

Each night as the sun set, it would then become visible once again in the same portion of the sky.

So, let's suppose the sun and moon rotate in a circular motion over the earth as it does according to FET, and let's assume the earth is not rotating as it does in RET.

How then, is it possible for the comet's location to appear to drop on the horizon as if it were "setting" and then appear back in its original location the next day? If the earth isn't rotating away from the comet and the comet is just moving away from us, it's almost like the comet is teleporting back to it's original location in the sky each night, yet it is clear that it fades each night, as though it is moving away from us, yet it's location gets reset?

If you assume FET, then it is apparent that this comet is not behaving in a way that makes any sense whatsoever. If you assume RET, the comet is moving in a way that is consistent.

So, how does FET explain the inconsistent behavior of the comet observed in this case?

[Pete Svarrior]

I see no inconsistency. In FET, all celestial bodies rotate around the Earth, creating their apparent rising and setting. It would be inconsistent to assume that your comet was the first body not to do that.

[GoldCashew]

Haley's Comet appears every 76 years or so.

So, with FE theory, what or where is the comet hanging around and doing for those 75 years that it doesn't traverse our sky? Is it circling the back side of the flat Earth disk and then for some reason after 76 years it reappears again to where we can see it above our flat disk side? How does FE explain this behavior whereas with RE it is simply due to Haley's Comet orbiting trajectory around our Solar System.

[Dr David Thork]

Pretty sure last time I saw, FET leans heavily upon the works of Seneca to explain comets. Seneca was in direct opposition to Aristotle. Aristotle believed comets were a phenomena of the upper atmosphere. Where Aether burst into flame and voila ... comet.

Seneca said this was a load of old tosh and wrote quite a bit about comets.

https://www.stoictherapy.com/resources-naturalquestions#book7

Enjoy.

[GreatATuin]

I see no inconsistency. In FET, all celestial bodies rotate around the Earth, creating their apparent rising and setting. It would be inconsistent to assume that your comet was the first body not to do that.

I'll agree with you on one point: the rising and setting of the comet works exactly the same way as the other celestial bodies. The comet does slowly move on the celestial sphere, unlike the fixed stars but like the Moon, the Sun and the planets. Over short periods, these celestial bodies can almost be considered as fixed.

But I still have to see a flat Earth model that explains how we see the celestial sphere spinning around the northern and southern celestial poles, the fixed stars forming perfect circles from any point on Earth. Even under EA, something that appears directly overhead is actually directly overhead, which means the fixed stars must travel along latitude lines. A fixed star will always be at zenith at the same latitude, that can be found with the formula 90-d where d is its declination. You can project the position of the stars on a Mercator map to easily see the apparent latitude of the fixed stars : http://astronomia.blog.br/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/AstronomiaBlogBr-carta-celeste-mercator.pdf . Depending on the flat Earth model, this leads to very strange trajectories and big questions on how we can see the stars the way we can see them.

What we see in the sky is exactly what we expect if we are on a spinning sphere with a fixed celestial sphere around us - or if we were on a fixed sphere with the celestial sphere spinning around us, as we thought for centuries, it doesn't make a difference to the observer. You might say it could be a spinning sphere around a flat Earth, but it doesn't explain how we can see the totality of the celestial sphere at the Equator, only half of it at the poles, and more generally why the angular elevation of the celestial poles and the stars we can or can not see depend only on one thing: latitude.

[RhesusVX]

I see no inconsistency. In FET, all celestial bodies rotate around the Earth, creating their apparent rising and setting. It would be inconsistent to assume that your comet was the first body not to do that.

If the FET is correct, and all celestial bodies rotate around the Earth, surely the following would be observed:

1. The Sun and Moon would change their apparent size in the sky as they move towards and away from you
2. The Sun and Moon would never actually disappear behind a horizon, instead just follow a linear path across the sky
3. We would never observe eclipses due to them always being opposite each other as they rotate around the Earth

Given that the Sun and Moon don't change their apparent size in the sky, do disappear behind a horizon and do produce predictable eclipses, I'd love to know what other aspects of FET account for these direct observations.  Theories are all fine, they provide fuel for learning and growth, but it's also important to refine those theories as we learn more and more about how reality matches theory.