And in a few weeks time Orion will rise around about this time.of the evening. It's always the sign that the freezing cold late evening dog walks are on the (fictional) horizon.
Also, Jupiter is very bright and prominent in the south at the minute. The brightest thing you can see about 10pm. If you look at it with binoculars and can hold them steady (try leaning against something and hold your elbows to your chest), you should be able to resolve it as a disc rather than a point like a star, might be able to make out two red bands if you look long enough and you will see the four major moons.
Basically if it looks a bit like " . . O . ." it is Jupiter. Bit the moons move from night to night, or you can see the change after a few hours. So checking back later you might see ".. . O .". With a telescope, you can see the shadow of a moon being cast over Jupiter as it passes in front. It is harder to see the moon itself without a really big telescope. The moon will also pass behind after it turns.
This gets a bit interesting. Get something like a ball on a string (or a swingball), set it in motion spinning round and watch from the side. From above it goes around in an even circle. From the side it appears to go slow at one extreme, speed up, slow down, turn, go back. From the side it is because we can't really see the depth. Now try sticking a big bit of card on your swingball post. You will see the ball pass in front, seem to slow, turn, speed up in the other direction, disappear from view, come out the other side, slow down, turn, pass back in front. If you have the light behind you, then you will see both the ball and a shadow pass across your bit of card.
Now watch the moons of Jupiter. Clearly much slower to our eyes, because they have a much greater distance to travel, but over the course of a night or a few nights, you see exactly the same behavior. Each moon will go one way, appear to pass in front of the planet, a shadow will be cast across the planet, it will slow, turn, speed up again, appear to pass behind, come out the other side, slow, turn, etc. And each moon has a different but regular period for doing this. The extremes of this movement has one moon showing the lowest extremes, one showing the furthest extremes and the two others in the middle. You basically get the swingball effect I described but with four different balls at the same time.
This pattern is EXACTLY as if there were four objects in a circular obit. Not similar, exactly. I don't usually like using block capitals but I did there because there is no element of doubt. If you use basic equations of circular motion then you can predict exactly how Jupiter and it's moons would look at any given time. Or you can do a computer 3d simulation and view it from the side to verify it is exactly the same.
That leads to a couple of questions. Why would a naturally occurring projector give the exact apperence of four moons in a circular orbit if this is just a projector showing things in 2d. It is an exact 2d representation of something 3d. The second question is, how would you then get a shadow? Lets just say that Jupiter is one perfectly crisp projected (moving and changing) image and the moons are four more (more powerful telescopes will show even more moons, but lets not go there right now). Then you must logically have to have 4 other independent objects projecting the moons. So you have 5 light beams showing your planet and moons. But in certain circumstances, one light beam also causes a black dot to move across the planet in exactly the same way a shadow would. What projector mechanism can do this and why when you trace a line from the position of the sun does this shadow appear exactly where it should do?
If this is a faked planet with faked moons and a fake shadow being projected, then it is an absolutely perfect fake of what you would see in a 3d solar system and this perfection can be proven with mathematical, physical or computer models. Not a mindset thing, you can build it with clockwork and see it.
The answer is of course that the projector musing is a complete load of bollocks and while it may just about work with a very high level view, scratch the surface on any one details and it all falls apart. The same as any other flat earther theory.
