Category: Astronomers

The list below is believed complete, though membership — like everything here — is subject to revision.

• George Biddell Airy — The Astronomer Royal whose 1871 aether experiment was rebranded 'Airy's failure' and conscripted, posthumously and without consent, as a flat-earth proof.
• Anaximander — The Milesian who first set the Earth adrift, unsupported at the centre of things — and left it, all the same, flat on top.
• Tycho Brahe — Danish astronomer (1546–1601) whose geo-heliocentric system kept the Earth central while agreeing with the sky exactly — the Concordant Orrery's trick, three centuries early.
• Nicolaus Copernicus — Renaissance astronomer (1473–1543) who set the Earth in motion around the Sun — the geocentric and flat traditions' founding antagonist — and published as he died.
• Eratosthenes — Greek polymath (c. 276–194 BC) who measured the Earth's circumference to within a few percent — the figure whole-radian geometry declines to address.
• C. Fome — Disgraced exhibition-astronomer (b. 1738) whose celestial objects, shown to the paying public through his telescope, were revealed to be painted cards — the original Counterfeit Graphic Inserts (C.G.I.).
• Johannes Kepler — German astronomer (1571–1630) who found the planets move in ellipses, after first building a lovelier, wrong model of nested Platonic solids; a founder of modern optics.
• Dayton Miller — Eminent American physicist (1866–1941) who spent thirty years detecting an aether drift later reassigned, in full, to the temperature of his hut.
• Ptolemy — Alexandrian astronomer (c. 100–170 AD) whose Earth-centred cosmos held for 1,400 years — its central Earth, to his admirers' inconvenience, a sphere.

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