I am talking about rudimentary observations of the heavens by the naked eye. Such as Geocentrist Tycho Brahe used to record the data which Keplar stole to develop his heliocentric ideas. The medieval societies were dazzled by the fandangled telescope and assumed that this marvel of technology could zoom in and detect TRUTH which the scripture failed to detect.
So, you are limiting us to technology circa 1600? If that is the case, then you are right, there is no particular problem with geocentricism as the default knowledge of the Universe. Of course, for those of us living in the 21st century, there is lots more evidence available…
BTW, Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler did not live in the Middle Ages, but in fact the Early Modern Period.
There is nothing theoretical about the celestial poles. The northern celestial pole is positioned at Polaris. The southern celestial pole is positioned at the intersect of the southern cross and the pointers.
Sigh… I know where the poles are located.
First of all, the North Celestial Pole is
not positioned at Polaris. In fact, Polaris is roughly half a degree off the Pole.
Second, you have defined their position on a two dimensional map of the Sky. My point was, that for all practical purposes, we treat the actual celestial poles as being infinitely distant from us (if we treat treat the Sky as existing in three dimensions, which is more accurate). Indeed it has to be treated as being (practically) infinite or regardless of what model you choose, the Poles would not appear in the same location for observers all over the planet. Since we both know that space is not infinite, it therefore stands to reason, that the positioning of the Celestial Poles is theoretical.
Sorry, you are not grasping the issue at all.
Its not just that Polaris does not change position, but the fact that the south celestial pole also does not change position throughout the course of the year. And I am not talking about milliarcseconds. I am talking about dramatic alterations of the positions of the celestial poles throughout the year.
I am grasping the issue quite well actually. What you are failing to grasp, I think, is how large a Universe God created for us to explore.
Lets put it this way, the Universe has to be very large. Even if I accept your notion that I can’t use a telescope, we can get an approximation of the minimum size of the Universe. The Earth has an equatorial diameter of roughly 8000 miles. The best visual observations of the heavens prior to the invention of the Telescope were approximately to within an arcminute (1/60th of a degree). Since there is no perceptible movement in the poles during the course of a day to the naked eye, a little trig will show you that the poles must be located at a minimum distance of approximately 27.5 million miles (My trig is a little rusty, so I might be a little off there, but I think that is about right). So the Universe needs to be at least that big.
Now, the above is just a calculation based on a single day. The thing is, you apparently support the notion of Tycho Brahe’s model of the Universe. I.e., the Sun and Moon orbit the Earth, and the planets orbit the Sun. There is no particular reason, that I can see to assume that the stars don’t also orbit the Sun… so using the same basic calculation, and assuming the currently accepted distance to the Sun is accurate, we get a minimum distance to the poles of roughly 639 billion miles. Space probes have gotten about 10 billion miles from Earth, so this distance does not seem an unreasonable minimum size of the Universe. Of course, the result is the same regardless of whether the Earth orbits the Sun, or the Sun orbits the Earth and the stars orbit the Sun.
Now lets go back to the question of the stars orbiting the Earth directly… Now we have problems, because with telescopes, we can measure small amounts of Parallax that occur over the course of a year on thousands of stars. The problem is not easily solved unless the stars either orbit the sun directly, or we orbit the sun directly.
So your question of the position of the Celestial Pole is a non issue as long as the Universe is at least about 1.3 trillion miles across.
to be continued…
–
Bill
Would you please re-clarify?