Flat Earth: sun position from Australia

This post was born to reply to a friend in Italy who believes the earth is flat.

We started a conversation over the phone because I’m living in Brisbane, Australia, and he wanted some pics of the sun for some obscure reasoning of his own. But when I went into details and I was the one asking for a specific picture the conversation stopped.

So I use this space to complete my chain of thoughts.

First, let’s start using the flat earth model.

The sun is a disk rotating over the earth and never setting.

Since during the equinox days there’s light both at the north and at the south pole, and since the sun is on the equator, the light cone that the sun emits must be like this:

The yellow cross is the sun at the center, sitting on the white circle (the equator). The white cross is the north/south and east/west directions from Italy.

Now, if we move the yellow circle to represent the sunrise in Italy the day of the equinox, we have this:

Where one red lines represent the East and the other one the direction you would see the sun rising that day (North-East).

We can do the same thing for Brisbane where I am.

Note that in both cases the flat earth model tells us that the sun will rise in the NE direction. In Brisbane even more than in Italy.

Since this is a circle, the same will apply for the sun setting. The direction will be NW.

That’s simple, right? Even kids understand this pictures.

Now the conversation with my friend stopped when I asked him to take a picture of the sun at sunset or sunrise one day of his choice between the 19 and the 22 of March 2017.

We are in winter now, or summer for north hemisphere people, over the solstice, and I’m still waiting for that picture.

But, since astronomy tells us that that day the sun rises precisely to the East and sets precisely to the West, no matter where you are on earth, I took a picture too. 

Here we go: the sun setting the 19 of March 17 (the other days it was cloudy) from my balcony.

As astronomy says, the sun is setting precisely to the West. The flat earth model is wrong.

But there’s more.
Every one knows that during summer in the southern hemisphere the sun rise from the south-east, goes to north at mid-day, and set to the south-west.
And for that reason I took a similar picture a late afternoon of January 2017, well before sunset.

You can see my same balcony, but this time I'm using the front railing as reference, because the sun sets very much to the south (SW).

Now let's go back to the flat earth model: according to it, there’s no way and no place on earth where you would be able to see the sun disappearing in the SW direction!

Flat earth model and reality:

The supposed sun circle and what you see everyday from Australia.

There you go.

You don’t even need math to understand and verify how much the flat earth model is wrong.

FAIL.

You can now check the first posts of this blog and smile at the ways the sun is supposed to light the earth according to the flat earth model.