My flat earth model finally collapsed after a 2 am star test
I've been toying with the flat earth angle for a few months, mostly as a debate hobby, but last Friday in Austin I took out my cheap telescope and tracked Jupiter's moons for 3 hours. The shadow angles just didn't line up with any flat model I could draw, no matter how I bent the math. I ended up admitting it to the guy at the observatory meetup, and he just laughed and showed me a better way to chart orbits. Has anyone else had a pet theory fail hard once you actually tested it with gear, and how did you handle the mental flip?
Did you ever try measuring the actual shadow positions instead of just eyeballing them? I used to think the whole bendy light thing had some merit, but then I grabbed my own scope and tracked the moons over a few nights. The numbers just kept pointing to a round system, no matter how many times I redrew the lines. It was a weird week admitting I was wrong, but honestly it felt way better than forcing the math to fit.