A month ago, I mentioned the so-called "green flash" as one of my "
5 Characteristics of Sunset to Distinguish Between Flat Earth and Globe Earth.." I meant to get back to this but it slipped my mind until
RonJ brought it up today in another topic.
I used to hear about the "green flash" but even though I'd seen a lot of sunsets over the world's oceans, I had never witnessed a green flash. It wasn't until recently that I learned it was a real thing and not some mythical afterimage optical illusion. But I now understand what it is and have seen it, at least in video and photography imagery I've taken of the setting sun. And I also understand the explanation for it, but only in the context of a globe earth with an atmo-
sphere. That explanation doesn't work for a flat earth with a planar atmo-
layer. As such, I don't know how a flat earth model with an atmolayer explains this phenomenon.
The most comprehensive source (I think) for explaining the sun's Green Flash are a set of Web pages posted by San Diego State University's (former?) adjunct astronomy professor Dr. Andrew T. Young's page at
https://aty.sdsu.edu/ . It's not very well organized, in my opinion, but rather a set of Web pages that seems as if it was composed and evolved over time, but there's a wealth of information not just about the green flash but of atmospheric effects on optics. It's a resource that's been very helpful for me in understanding the visual effects of atmospheric refraction, which for me had previously been limited to anomalous effects on radar and HF/UHF/EHF communications systems.
As explained in Dr. Young's pages, it's a complex combination of light extinction, diffusion (scattering) and astronomical refraction. It's this latter essential element that is absent in a flat earth/atmolayer model.
In a flat earth model
that incorporates EAT, light bending up and away from the surface of the earth could cause the requisite refraction, but it would cause the green flash to appear on the bottom of the setting sun, not the top.
Light from the sun needs to be refracted downward along distances much greater than those required to produce terrestrial mirages. At least that's the mechanism as it is explained for an atmoSPHERE. If it can work through an atmoLAYER, and without ignoring other claimed explanations for varous sun set phenomena in a flat earth model, I'd like to invite that discussion.