As your news feed slowly starts to die down with news about this week’s solar eclipse, hundreds of scientists around the world are sifting through their freshly collected data and discoveries. And so is the globe’s flat-Earth community. Queue the X-Files theme tune.
Before the eclipse, flat-Earthers were hopeful the phenomenonwould poke holes in the heliocentric consensus, unmask the truth, dispose of the charade, and we could all happily live on our disc-shaped world. Now the day has come and passed, how do they feel?
You might think that literally seeing the Moon eclipse the Sun would be enough to convince someone that the Earth orbits the Sun and that the Moon revolves around the Earth. However, many appear more confident and engaged than ever before.
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Rapper B.o.B took to Twitter to broadcast some skepticism about the total solar eclipse. He sarcastically tweeted: “It's so amazingly beautiful how the moon isn't visible before and after a total solar eclipse #SolarEclipse17 #FknScienceBro… so when the moon finally scoots over, will i be able to see it ???”
When asked what is causing the solar eclipse if it wasn’t the moon, he just replied “Rahu”, referencing the mythological figures Rahu and Ketu used by the ancient Vedic culture to explain astronomical events.
Some flat-Earthers have taken to YouTube to pick at the incredible images that NASA proudly, and quite rightly, showed off following the eclipse. Some saw these NASA images as CGI fakes, a common rebuttal from modern believers of the “geocentric model”.
One YouTube video, titled “FAKE ECLIPSE,” claims the Moon-shaped object blocking the Sun was not the Moon. They “reversed the light” on photo-editing software to highlight some supposed oddities within the image. This revealed that shade/color of the Moon in the images was the same as the space behind the Sun, ie. black. This, they argue, suggests the solar eclipse had something to do with the Sun itself, not any celestial body in front of the Sun.
“Folks, nothing caused the Sun eclipses today, but the Sun, as far as we can tell,” the video says.
Whether you watched the solar eclipse on screen or in person, you may have noticed a lot of people commenting on how strange the lighting and shadows appeared during the time it was reaching totality. In reality, this is likely because we never see the world around us in this unique type of lighting. However, to flat-Earthers, this was proof of something fishy. They don't expand on what exactly is suspicious, but it is something very fishy indeed, apparently.
Better luck next time for the total solar eclipse on July 2,2019, I guess.