Bren2K Stan will accuse you of being in some Heliocentric religion - he always does - pretending not to know what a religion is. He has this thing about "heliocentric" - as if it was some gamechanger. Of course, the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System but as the Solar System is a totally insignificant tiny backwater, other than for purely local reference, the Sun is at the centre of nothing, it isn't even anywhere near the centre of our own galaxy, so any reference to "heliocentric" is kind of missing the point.

However, mankind's ingenuity and technical achievements even means that we have an actual image of the actual solar system, taken from deep space in 1990 by the Voyager spacecraft. (Voyager 1 is around 20,000 million km from the Sun and the round trip light time to and from Earth is over 37 hours. More info, and live odometers, here: voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/

At the moment, Voyager 1 is travelling away from the Sun at approx. 17km per second, but is getting closer to Earth, which is "catching up" with the spacecraft at a net (approx) 3km per second. How can this be? Well, because Earth orbits the Sun, the spacecraft's relative speed changes as when the Earth is in the half of its orbit "away from" Voyager, the separation speed increases, and when the other is in the other half of its orbit, the speed of the Earth in orbit considerably exceeds the speed of Voyager away from teh Sun, and so for a time, Earth appears to be "catching up". And is, in the sense that the gap between Earth and Voyager reduces. This is of course pretty conclusive evidence of the Earth actually being in orbit around the Sun, even though that was hardly the point of the Voyager missions.

These images were never planned to be taken, and the craft were only programmed to take the images principally after a campaign by the late Carl Sagan. The panoramic view of the inner planets is comprised of a mosaic of individual frames, and when you contemplate what it is, is breathtaking, food for thought - and of course a proof of the Sun being exactly eher it is supposed to be, at the solar system's centre (see accompanying diagram to put the mosaic into context)

Naturally, there are those who don't believe in the existence of such spacecraft, etc., and I already know Stanley will pretend to be richly amused by what he will undoubtedly call this "fake CGI", but for the rest of us, just sit back and wonder.

Bren2K Stan will accuse you of being in some Heliocentric religion - he always does - pretending not to know what a religion is. He has this thing about "heliocentric" - as if it was some gamechanger. Of course, the Sun is at the centre of the Solar System but as the Solar System is a totally insignificant tiny backwater, other than for purely local reference, the Sun is at the centre of nothing, it isn't even anywhere near the centre of our own galaxy, so any reference to "heliocentric" is kind of missing the point.

However, mankind's ingenuity and technical achievements even means that we have an actual image of the actual solar system, taken from deep space in 1990 by the Voyager spacecraft. (Voyager 1 is around 20,000 million km from the Sun and the round trip light time to and from Earth is over 37 hours. More info, and live odometers, here: voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/

At the moment, Voyager 1 is travelling away from the Sun at approx. 17km per second, but is getting closer to Earth, which is "catching up" with the spacecraft at a net (approx) 3km per second. How can this be? Well, because Earth orbits the Sun, the spacecraft's relative speed changes as when the Earth is in the half of its orbit "away from" Voyager, the separation speed increases, and when the other is in the other half of its orbit, the speed of the Earth in orbit considerably exceeds the speed of Voyager away from teh Sun, and so for a time, Earth appears to be "catching up". And is, in the sense that the gap between Earth and Voyager reduces. This is of course pretty conclusive evidence of the Earth actually being in orbit around the Sun, even though that was hardly the point of the Voyager missions.

These images were never planned to be taken, and the craft were only programmed to take the images principally after a campaign by the late Carl Sagan. The panoramic view of the inner planets is comprised of a mosaic of individual frames, and when you contemplate what it is, is breathtaking, food for thought - and of course a proof of the Sun being exactly eher it is supposed to be, at the solar system's centre (see accompanying diagram to put the mosaic into context)

Naturally, there are those who don't believe in the existence of such spacecraft, etc., and I already know Stanley will pretend to be richly amused by what he will undoubtedly call this "fake CGI", but for the rest of us, just sit back and wonder.