Yes, it’s an older case by over a decade, and very, very few people still take Nancy and her ZetaTalk site seriously.
But, I think it’s important for the sake of “complete” coverage of the Planet X phenomenon, of which she has been a major part. I also think that it’s informative of what’s going on today with doomsday ideas related to Planet X and 2012: The same crap that she spouted back then for the pole shift she said would happen in 2003, people are still using today for 2012.
My Photos and Video from the May 20, 2012, Annular Eclipse
With two friends, I drove 480 miles south to just outside of Albuquerque, NM (Richard C. Hoagland territory!). We were in the path of full annularity, and we set up in a beautiful spot with no people around us and clear sight to the western horizon.
I took a long sequence of photos and created a few montages and even a movie. I’m only posting three of the montages (I don’t like the third one, but I’m posting it anyway). These are only 6% full size, and you can only get to it by clicking on the image to have it open in a new browser. The full-res versions are suitable for printing at 72″ wide at 300ppi … that’s a lot of pixels and brings my computer to a crawl when I open it.
Annular Solar Eclipse Montage, Type 0, Version 1.3 (click to embiggen)
Annular Solar Eclipse Montage, Type 2c, Version 1.3 (click to embiggen)
Annular Solar Eclipse Montage, Type 4, Version 1.1 (click to embiggen)
And here’s the movie:
I’m not going to go into image processing details here. If you’re interested, I posted a lengthy thread about it here that goes through all the gritty details.
Relevance to the Crazy Conspiracy
I’ve not addressed this conspiracy before on this blog, but I have in my podcast, Episode #24, “Help! The Sun (or Moon) Is Moving!” The premise is, as I said before, that the sun and/or moon is no longer rising or setting or in the sky where it previously was, or where it’s “supposed” to be.
The answer to this is that it always shifts position though the cycle repeats annually. It shifts because Earth’s axis is constantly pointing towards the North Celestial Pole, so as Earth orbits around the sun over the course of a year, the angle the sun makes with the horizon changes. It rises and sets closer to your hemisphere’s pole during your hemisphere’s summer, and vice versa.
The implication by most conpsiracists that I’ve heard – if they have an implication other than generally “something’s happening that NASA’s covering up!” – is that we are in the midst of a geographic pole shift that THEY don’t want you to know about. Again, I’ve addressed pole shifts before (such as here or here).
And, at least since I’ve been using the site for the last decade, they’ve all been 100% accurate! The point is that this would not be possible at all if we were undergoing a pole shift. Even a tiny pole shift, where I’m defining “tiny” by, say, 1° which would not be noticeable to these people claiming the sun/moon is in the wrong place, would shift the path of solar eclipses by a non-trivial amount.
And yet, these eclipses continue to demonstrably and perhaps stubbornly be where they were predicted to be decades ago.
Final Thoughts
This is something that I like about science and get a great sense of “ah ha!” when I come across it: Conspiracists, pseudoscientists, and others who claim to be re-writing science do so in isolation. They do not realize – or they choose to ignore – what the implications would be for their claims outside of their one phenomenon.
In this case, if Earth were undergoing any sort of geographic pole shift, the annular solar eclipse that we witnessed last weekend would not have taken place where it had been predicted. A shift of 1° of the poles would have shifted the eclipse’s path by around 70 miles (110 km). If we were in a pole shift of more than around 0.5°, I would not have seen the moon completely within the sun’s disk from where I was in Albuquerque.
And it’s really as simple as that. Claims in science do not exist in isolation. You must carry them through and apply them to all other things that rely upon that data.
It’s a bit late, but that’s ’cause I came home from my conference last week with a bacteria colony or virus infestation. Hard to record a podcast if you can’t talk.
This episode is shorter, only about 18 minutes long. It’s separated into two sections with the first being on the mechanisms to do a pole shift, and the second being how to tell if we’re in a geographic pole shift now (hint: we’re not).
It’s February 1, or at least it is in some parts of the world, which means another episode of the podcast has been posted. I was working on writing an all-inclusive episode on geographic pole shifts and then I realized that there was no way it would all fit in an hour episode, much less a half-hour episode.
So this is Part 1. In it, I talk about what one particular person and group claims to be the mechanism for a geographic pole shift, the past evidence that it’s happened, and the current evidence that it is happening. The person in question is Brent Miller, the group is The Horizon Project. You can buy their DVD for only $24.95!! Or if you do a bit of Googling (which according to my spell-checker is actually a word), then you can find at least the audio posted online.
I’ll warn you that this is a bit Coast to Coast AM clip-heavy. So if those annoy you, well, sorry. I actually practiced some restraint and didn’t include two additional clips (as-is, there are five).
Part 2 will come for the February 8 episode and will focus instead on the alleged evidence, what the only known mechanism(s) would be for flipping or moving Earth’s geographic poles. It will also address the conspiracy ideas that we already have undergone a geographic pole shift in the last few years and that NASA has just been hiding it … somehow. You’ll have to listen to Episode 22 to get more on that.
It has been suggested to me by multiple people that I should write a book about the astronomy of 2012 and why nothing’s going to happen – at least not based on any of the proposed physical mechanisms by 2012ers. Both of those people like my blog and think that it’s a niche missing out there amidst the mountains of 2012 apocalypse books. Hence the poll.
Responding
Please vote in the poll. I have never done a poll on WordPress before, and after reading that it was made through PollDaddy and that their free account limits it to 100 votes per month … if you can’t seem to vote, then please put your vote in the comments.
Commenting
If you have any comments that go beyond the simple poll, please feel free to make them. To give you an idea of what I am planning, it would be relatively short, having a first chapter going through a brief intro of the phenomenon, and then right in chapter 2 getting to planet x. Then pole shifts, galactic alignments, and solar storms. All of these topics I have written about on my blog before except for the solar one, though I have lectured about it in public talks.
Advice
I have never written a book before. If you think I should write one on this topic and you have experience doing so, please consider sending me relevant advice or put it in the comments. Especially if you have experience in the modern era of eBooks.
Additionally, in many of my posts, I talk about specific people’s claims, including quoting them. If you have legal experience that may be relevant, please e-mail me (as in, I don’t want to get sued if I put in print what Brent Miller said about the galactic “dark rift” on Coast to Coast).
Pricing
Finally, if you have suggestions on price, let me know. Besides ease of not going through a publishing company, I was thinking eBook because I could set the price low. Like $2.99 or something. I’m not really out here to make money on this (unlike many of the doomsdayers), but I do think that something nominal to cover time should be there.
Contacts
Again, if you happen to have gotten stuff similar to this published before, advice (comments here or e-mail) would be much appreciated. If you happen to be an editor or otherwise affiliated with a publishing company that you think would be interested in this, of course please e-mail me.
Final Thoughts
As always, I do actually read all comments posted, even if I don’t necessarily respond to every single one.
Exposing PseudoAstronomy 