No, there isn’t.

Relativity aside, there is no consistent framework by which we can fit the observed facts to a view in which the Sun, planets and stars orbit the earth. Plus, it makes no sense based on what we know about gravity and the masses of the Earth, the Sun and other stars.

If geocemtrism were correct, no one would be able to navigate interplanetary spacecraft as they actually do: applying Newtonian (and Einsteinian) principles in an approximately heliocentric model. Probes to Mars would need to negotiate all those nasty epicycles!!!

Lugosi, I have a fairly clear pic of Orion on flickr here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22177653@N03/2137686999/

I think so. The funny thing is that I still remember the class in 3rd Grade (when I was in which our teacher explained that the Earth was round, and here were the proofs. I vaguely remember it as an issue I simply hadn’t thought about before, but the fact that I remember it over 30 years later shows it must have meant something to me at the time.

In the larger scheme of things, remember, we always have to teach children these things. They won’t learn it otherwise. And hopefully by teaching them *how* we know such things, it might encourage them to use similar methods of thinking on other issues, too.

The Earth’s shape is a (or rather THE) Geoid.

Or is that just TOO pedantic?

I was also shocked when a traveling companion from the US, with a PhD in a physical science (don’t recall which discipline), did not know that fuzzy band of light in the sky was the Milky Way. Maybe growing up in a rural town where I could could see it every clear night made it important to me, but I thought anyone interested in science would have picked up on that sometime or other.

I say, chalk up as lost. Science doesn’t want those people back anyway.

Canopus itself was used by the ancient Greeks (Eratosthenes I think or maybe Hipparcos) as evidence the Earth is round.

Canopus could be seen from the Egyptian city of Alexandria (if memory serves) which the Greeks were familar with and sometimes visited – but not from Athens .. (ditto)

I first saw Canopus from the Los Angeles area. You really can see it from there … if you (a) get away from the city lights, (b) find an absolutely flat southern horizon, and (c) lower your expectations a bit. It appeared about as bright as a third- or fourth-magnitude star close to the zenith (again, away from city lights). Many people would probably never notice it unless they were specifically looking for it.

Then, a few years later, I went to Peru to see a total solar eclipse and then I saw Canopus as it was meant to be seen. Same thing for Sirius — it is *much* brighter when it’s overhead than when it’s at most 35 degrees up.

Oddly, it never struck me when I was in Chile (Cerro Tololo) as a child. I guess the image of the moon hadn’t been burned into my brain as much at that age. Or I was just too much in awe of all the cool telescopes and enormous condors and getting to drive those little electric carts around to pay attention to the sky.

Also, Kate is right:

In this post, Phil shows us how the basic principles of scientific inquiry can lead you to correct conclusions about the world around you, and how those conclusions and the data you used to arrive at them are not specialized, or difficult to understand.

I would add that equally as important are all the other suggestions for proofs that have been offered in the comments. We’ve got dozens of forms of evidence just off the tops of our heads, they’re all independent, and they all point to the same answer. This, we need to explain to the creationists, is what we mean by “theory”. Everything points to it being true, and nothing contradicts it. We are open to new evidence, but any new explanation first has to fit with all this existing evidence.

Science. It works, bitches!

Your instinct about the shadows was a good one. Eratosthenes’s result depends on the world-geometry you bring to bear on the problem. Anaxagoras used Eratosthenes’s observations (sun straight overhead at Alexandria, 7.5 degrees off course at Syene) to show that 40,000 stadia was the altitude of the Sun over a flat Earth.

The funny thing was that my friend whose car I was driving just didn’t get it. I couldn’t assemble the right words to explain it. Even funnier, when I got home a couple of friends didn’t understand how it worked, and I got very adept at drawing a diagram to explain how it works.

In Jan & Feb 2007 I photographed each months full Moon rising. On the horizon it is noticeably oval shaped, but within a few degrees the Moon is its circular old self. If refractive properties were causing stars to appear & disappear even the constellations would be distorted everywhere we looked in the sky & there would be nothing familiar for us to look at.

Chris.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=375074

A quarter of Britons think Winston Churchill was a mythical figure, and about half think Sherlock Holmes was real. Survey of 3000 people.

It’s important that people not just “know” that Earth is round. It’s rather critical that they understand what it is empirically that points to Earth’s roundness. I consider a public who believes in our planet’s sphericity for no better reason than that it’s a popular fact to be every bit as ignorant & medieval as a flat-Earther.