Polaris & Victory New Dealer Tools: Fill & Download for Free

Polaris, or more specifically Polaris Aa, is a gigantic star, nearly 40 times as large as the Sun and over a thousand times brighter. It is orbited by another star, Polaris Ab, a fairly normal, Sunlike star at roughly Uranus’s distance. Polaris Aa is a Cepheid variable, which means it is in the process of moving off the main sequence, and pulsates in brightness over the course of weeks.These factors together make the the Polaris A system an unlikely home to life. The raging, pulsing monster in the middle, and the bull on a leash orbiting it, mean that, even if any planets could have formed in such a maelstrom, they would have been baked sterile by radiation.But the system has a third star, Polaris b, that is just an ordinary, sunlike star and orbits the As at a 2400 AU distance. It’s entirely plausible there could be planets around it, even perhaps habitable ones.

You don't need fancy equipment. Get yourself a plastic protractor from your local dollar store (school supplies section) and make a simple clinometer.How to Make a ClinometerIf you live in the Northern Hemisphere, on a clear night go outside and measure how far the North Star Polaris is above the horizon, with your homemade clinometer.Now, find your latitude on your smart phone, GPS device or map.Guess what? It's a match. That's right, the angle of the North Star above the horizon is the same as your latitude on the globe Earth.You can do this measurement anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere and the angle matches your latitude.North Pole? 90 degrees, straight up.New York? About 41 degrees.Miami? About 26 degrees.The Equator? 0 degrees, Polaris is at the horizon.Southern Hemisphere? Polaris can't be seen because the spherical Earth gets in the way.These simple observations would not work on a flat Earth.The flat Earth model has Polaris several thousand miles above the North Pole, in the center of their pizza world, but because of simple geometry, the viewing angles would mostly disagree with the observer's latitude (unlike reality).Not only that, but according to the flat Earth, Polaris should be seen from any pepperoni on the flat Earth pizza, but we know that it is actually below the horizon in the Southern Hemisphere, only visible from half the globe.Navigators at sea have used the stars to determine their latitude on the spherical Earth for hundreds of years. These modern day flat-earth-misfits need to get off YouTube and go look up at the stars. They might just learn a thing or two.Addendum:Several comments have pointed out that this is circular reasoning, because latitudes are based on the globe Earth, and this is a flat Earth question. That's reasonable.But it's not circular reasoning because most flat-earthers agree with the globe latitudes that are equally spaced about 69 miles per degree (ignoring small differences for oblateness).This is the one thing the flat-earthers cannot deny because they use the Azimuthal equidistant projection, which has equally spaced latitudes in agreement with the globe, but they ignore the fact that on a flat Earth observations of the altitude of Polaris would not agree with their accepted latitudes.Gleason's MapObservations of Polaris if it were a few thousand miles up as the flat-earthers maintain:Latitudes would not be equidistant, which disagrees with their map! The latitude distances become exponentially absurd as one approaches the equator and beyond.

Here's a simple thought experiment that might help:Imagine a large pepperoni pizza:Now picture a small piece of sausage suspended in mid air about 6 inches above the center of the pizza. That represents Polaris (the North Star).Question: Is the small piece of sausage visible from every pepperoni on the pizza?Of course it is.How about the crust? Is there a direct line of sight between the outer portions of the flat pizza and a suspended sausage piece 6 inches above the center?Yep.So how do the flat-earthers explain that Polaris can only be seen from the Northern Hemisphere, or only from the innermost portion of their pizza-world?Simple: Flip a coin and choose your go-to catch-phrase of the day. Today it's "refraction", and tomorrow it's "perspective". Using one of these two words is all that's required to explain away the absurdities of the flat-earth model.Bon Appétit!