One explanation for why the Sun doesn't shrink at sunset, especially championed by Tom Bishop, is that perspective doesn't work at large distances.
Round earthers looking at Flat Earth theories often ask things like:
- Why does the sun not shrink as it recedes to the horizon?
- Why does the moon not shrink as it recedes to the horizon?
One answer I have seen is that perspective as we know it on earth-like scales "has never been proven" to work at larger scales. This includes ideas like:
- Objects past a certain distance will stop shrinking so much
- Objects past a certain distance will stop losing angular velocity so much (i.e. why does the sun cover 15 degrees per hour everywhere on the planet at all times)
What is the flat earth explanation, then, for why planets have widely varying angular diameters?
In the Round Earth model, for example, the distance from the Earth to Mars varies from 54.6 million kilometers to 401 million km. If perspective works the same at any distance, this would mean that Mars should be approximately 7.3 times as big in angular diameter when it's closest to Earth than when it's farthest away.
Actual observations of Mars' angular diameter (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter#Use_in_astronomy) indicate that it varies between
3.49″ – 25.13″ - a factor of 7.2, which is pretty close.
What's the Flat Earth explanation for this? It has to be the case that the distance to the planets is relatively constant, because you can perform the Eratosthenes experiment on any planet and show that if the earth is flat it's approximately 3000 miles. Are the planets like Mars somehow growing and shrinking? Is that the explanation?
Or are they actually orbiting the Sun on a scale compatible with round-earth theory, and perspective works exactly like the ancient Greeks said it would?