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Said LeGrande: I just want to be clear, when you look up into the night sky and aim a telescope at Saturn, do you really believe that Saturn is exactly where you are pointing the telescope?
According to you, the actual position of Saturn is 10AU * 2.1 degrees/AU = 21 degrees from its observed position in the sky. People who are on some serious drugs might believe that. Do you believe it?

That's a great point. Now Saturn does orbit the sun at the rate of 29.5 years per full orbit, or .0000232021 degrees per minute. Saturn, at 9AU, would be about 75 light minutes away. So the angle changed in Saturn during the time it takes its light to reach us would be .0000232021 degrees. That's light time correction.

But as you say, in LeGrande's world, 75 light-minutes times the earth's rotation would be 18.75 whole degrees!

Or what about Jupiter, which is 30AU out? That's roughly 60 degrees lagged. Are you saying that if I were to look up at night with a super powerful telescope and see Jupiter, it would be actually 60 degrees off?

What if there were a reasonably stationary star 86.5722414651AU away (that's 12 light hours) - if we looked up and saw it at night, would it really be on the other side of the world? (Hey - it might have moved a little - but it aint gonna have moved 180 degrees in 12 hours!)

Thanks,

-Jesse

What if there were a reasonably stationary star 86.5722414651AU away (that's 12 light hours) - if we looked up and saw it at night, would it really be on the other side of the world? (Hey - it might have moved a little - but it aint gonna have moved 180 degrees in 12 hours!)

With LeGrande's astrophysics, it's not possible to estimate where -- not even approximately -- the "actual" positions of nearby stars are. For instance, Wikipedia says that Sirius is 8.6 +-0.04 light-years away. 1 light-year is 63,240 AU. So, +-0.04 light-years is +-2530 AU. In other words, in LeGrandeic astrophysics, the "real" Sirius could be anywhere along the diurnal circle. Inspite of this, magic leprechauns have informed LeGrande that...

Sirius is close to us so its actual position is going to be very close to its apparent position.

Correction:

Where I claim that Jupiter is 30AU away, I was incorrect. It's only about 5.2AU away from the sun. But Pluto is roughly 38 AU from the Sun and my point still stands that if the sun's gravity direction is 2.1 degrees ahead of its optical position due to the distance of sun-earth and the light flight time thereof (Which is LeGrande's claim), then Pluto will appear over 60 degrees displaced from its actual position.

Second correction:

When I stated "20 arcseconds is 0.000277777 degrees. You're talking about 2.1 degrees, which is seven thousand five hundred times bigger!" I was wrong on two counts. First, 20 arcseconds is 0.00555555556 degrees, not whatever I said before. Secondly, 2.1 degree IS 7560 arcseconds, whereas I had incorrectly stated 7500 as the ratio between 2.1Deg and 20ArcSec. The ratio between 2.1Deg and 20ArcSec is really 378 - so the displacement of 2.1 degrees is three hundred and seventy eight times larger then the observed and calculated displacement for the sun! That's absurd!

Please accept my most sincere apologies for the inaccurate statements. It is my goal and practice to be honest and accurate and I freely admit when I find I've been wrong.

But my general point, that 2.1 degrees is absurdly beyond anything that's been measured or calculated still stands.

Thanks,

-Jesse

PS: I'll answer the other post later, gotta run now.