Take that spotlight and use a diameter of 32 miles. Put it 3000 miles in the air aboce the earth and calculate what diameter is covered by the light off that spotlight. I am not in a place where I can do the math right now, so I will try to show the answer hopefully by tomorrow.
Ok so I tried the calculation and you would have to guess at what angle the light is leaving the spotlight sun. I picked 30 degrees which would cover an area with a 3000 mile diameter. That is the distance from California to New York and Mexico to part of Canada. That spotlight did not light up anything in the Southern Hemisphere. I pulled the flashlight away to cover everything in the same timezone and the result was similar to how the sun would light up half the globe at a time. This means that the spotlight sun on a flat map and a orb sun on a globe would look the same to people on earth.
There are two questions this brings up as exceptions.
1) How are there long days in the southern hemisphere? The sun travels at a constant pace across the sky and so days can be up to 24 hours in the Southern Hemisphers. We have to trust others for this, so I am just going to let it be.
2) If the sun were a spotlight then why wouldn't the circle we see at high noon not turn into a squished oval by the time it sets? Why do we see the circle of the sun the entire time throughout the day?
Topic: FE and geometry (Read 32342 times)