[MENTION=4980]DFT_Dave[/MENTION], I wanted to continue with the thoughts on crepuscular rays, so I'm responding to my own post, while mentioning you. As I was pointing out in my previous post, the angles seen in the two photos of crepuscular rays hitting the earth (reproduced here for convenience)
Show that angles don't make sense for either the flat earth or the globular earth for a directly overhead sun, since the sun is obviously higher than our aircraft can fly over. I saw your thanks, Dave, so I assume you're still following, and since you haven't countered, I'll assume you agree. (Please correct my assumption, if needed.)
But it brought another thought to my mind. The flat earth (FE) sun and the globular earth (GE) sun are both representations of the sun we actually see, which is the source of the light for the crepuscular rays. I saw
this video (I think you posted it or I saw it somewhere else. The video is saying that the sunbeams going through holes in cardboard don't splay out, but it actually DOES show them spreading wider than the holes. This is also seen quite well when observing a solar eclipse through a pin hole--the image is definitely bigger than the hole it goes through, just as the video shows.
The proximity of the sun is not enough to explain the splayed out sun beams, because the size of the sun in both models is sufficient to account for the appearance of size we experience. What I mean by that is that the FE sun at ~3000 miles and the GE sun at ~93,000,000 miles are the same size in our sky. Therefore, whichever is the case, the rays of the sun will still cause the same phenomena when directly overhead.
Therefore, for both models we would need to come up with a reason why we would see the crepuscular rays as we do, at the angles we observe.
Here's the GE model's solution:
The sun, as it sets, actually DOES reach an altitude where the crepuscular rays appear to emanate from about 58,000 miles. And it reaches altitudes that are lower, too, where it can appear to be behind (but not in) low-lying clouds. Looking at it face-on, the sun appears low in the sky, and the crepuscular rays emanate from it. If you were to look at the crepuscular rays edge-on, they would show much shallower angles, like those that appear to the sides of the face-on view (to the farther right on the pictures above). But viewing from the side, the angles get very small (measured from the ground)--these are the rays that hit your eyes when looking at crepuscular rays--the shiny spots of direct sunlight in one of the photos above.
So there are really 2 angles at issue--1 from the sun to the ground in a plane perpendicular to your line-of-sight, and one that is invisible from your point of view--the one in the plane that you share with the sun. These are going to be much smaller angles (measured from the ground).
And when I say "measured from the ground" it means from the tangent of the globe at the ground where the ray hits.
For the FE model, I'm not the preferred advocate--you should be doing this. But I haven't seen a lot of real math or logical thought, so I'll attempt it.
First, the angles do get smaller when dealing with the closer sun that always hovers over the earth, but they don't get close to zero without an extremely long baseline--the sun at 3000 miles high would have to be at 3000 miles distance along the ground to achieve a 45 deg angle of crepuscular rays that reach my eyes (this is along the invisible angle I mentioned earlier). This is approximately the angle of the sun as I viewed it at about 7 pm.
That's not too bad--it's somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, compared to my Colorado location. That means, of course, that it would be noon at that location over the Pacific Ocean--the sun would be directly overhead. Again, that's not a problem, except that it means that it is noon a the Hawaiian longitude. But we know that's not true, as Hawaiian time is only 3 hours different from Colorado time--so it would be 4 pm there. (Actually it would be 3 pm without Daylight savings time.) So the FE model is off in its timing by 3 hours.
This timing is different for different angles of the sunlight. If the angle from the ground is 30 degrees, the distance to where the sun is directly overhead in order to appear at 58000 feet is 5100 miles away--somewhere near Japan. But Japan is really at 9 am, not noon.
Let's try 15 degrees. The distance to "noon" (sun directly overhead) for a 3000 mile altitude is 11,196 miles away. That's more than half the distance around the world at Latitude 39 (Colorado), so the sun should not even still be shining, but it is at 15 degrees above the horizon. Even better, since it is more than halfway around the world, the sun is already coming up in the eastern sky in Colorado, but it hasn't set yet in the west. The sun would be visible on both horizons!!
