Empirical Earth · The Sky — Sun, Moon & Stars

The Sun stays the same size — and sets bottom-first

The claim

“The Sun is a local spotlight that recedes to a vanishing point at sunset.”

What is true

The Sun does change apparent size over the year, and it often looks different near the horizon.

What is measured

The Sun holds a steady ~0.5° (about 32 arcminutes ) across the whole day; a nearby “local Sun” would visibly shrink toward sunset. It doesn’t.

What would show this is wrong

the Sun’s angular diameter shrinking measurably between noon and sunset.

Sources

  1. Sun's angular diameter. The Sun subtends ~0.5° (31–32 arcmin) and varies only ~3% over the year (Earth's elliptical orbit); its angular size is essentially constant from sunrise to sunset, i link
  2. Higher floors, later sunset (Burj Khalifa fatwa). In 2011 the Grand Mufti of Dubai ruled that Muslims on the upper floors of the 828 m Burj Khalifa must delay breaking their Ramadan fast, by link
  3. Samuel Rowbotham (“Parallax”), Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe , 1865. The founding text of the modern flat-Earth movement, and the source of most of the arguments answered in this refe link
The full entry, with the working →

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