The Earth may not be flat.

This is the last article about a git project, https://github.com/jamesdogrady/sunGleason where I take a purported flat earth map and see what sunlight looks like on this map. In reality, ½ of the earth is illuminated by the sun (slightly more due to refraction). The part of the earth that is in darkness is in darkness because it’s turned away from the sun. On “flat earth” , the part of the earth that’s in darkness is in darkness because the sun is too far away and can no longer be seen. Part of this model assumes a local sun thousands of miles away of course. A sun 93 million miles away would illuminate the entire surface of a flat disk.

Here are daylight pictures at the start of each season in 2025.

It’s important to note in those places on earth where there is not 24 hours of day or night, the sun is experienced that same way in all places. It rises in the east, sets towards the west and is the same size throughout the day and throughout the year. In the north during the winter, you see the same sort of sun you see during the summer just farther south in the sky.

Given that all people experience the sun in the same way, the question is why the sun casts a different pattern of light and darkness when it is overhead at different spots in the earth. The point at which the sun is overhead will change from the Tropic of Cancer, to the Tropic of Capricorn over the course of the change of seasons but the daylight pattern changes dramatically from season to season for no physical reason.

Lets take for example the Spring and Fall, when the sun is overhead at the equator. We’d expect the pattern to be similar and it is. We see the light here making basically a straight line through the north pole and illuminating the entire planet below that line. Spring and Fall on this drawing does show one important observation that matches reality. At any point in time, roughly ½ of the surface of the planet is in daylight and ½ is in darkness. Spring and fall are the only time that that’s true on this map.

As the sun moves north from Spring to Summer, towards the Tropic of Cancer, the northern edge becomes a curve instead of a straight line. There’s nothing that can account for this change. if the daylight edge is straight when it is over the equator, how can it be less straight as the sun moves north? Also, the sun becomes less able to light up the south as it goes north. When the sun is overhead at the equator, it can light up half the planet 90 degrees south of the equator. When the sun is overhead at 23.5 degrees N, only part of the planet 90 degrees south of that can be illuminated. For some reason, the summer sun is much less effective at lighting the surface of the planet than it is at other times of the year.

In winter, the situation changes. Suddenly the sun can illuminate virtually the entire surface of the earth, leaving only a small portion in night at any given time. Once again, to accept this map, one would have to explain this property of light.

Of course, the reason for the pseudo-conundrum is that this map is just a projection of the globe earth. At the equinoxes, when the pattern of daylight forms a more or less straight line though a longitude, the projection shows half the earth illuminated with the straight line being that line of longitude, just the edge of where daylight reaches on the globe earth.

For summer and fall, the pattern is explained by distortions on the map. The parts of the earth above the equator occupy less space on the map than in reality and the parts below the equator occupy much more of the space than on the real earth. If you were to measure the length of the 10 degree north lattitude line, the equator and the 10 degrees south latitude line, the 10 degree north and south lines will be roughly equal while the equator will be longer. On the map, the length of each latitude line increases as you go south all the way to end. The deviation from reality increases the farther south you go so the edge of the earth has a circumference that is well above anything measured on an actually existing earth.

The result of this is that shapes shown in the north are too small and shapes drawn in the south are far too large. This creates an illusion that the December solstice sun covers large portions of the earth leaving a modest oval of night, and the June solstice daylight forms an oval shape.

The project allows you to change the projection and we can change it for a point where the sun is roughly overhead at the December solstice, 23.4 S, 45.93 W. (these are estimates based on points examined by the program). The result looks like what you’d expect.

While the shapes of the continents are distorted, you see that daylight forms a circle over the noon point. Daylight forms a circle on the earth. This is expected on a globe and required on a flat earth with an overhead sun. Since this Gleason map doesn’t show daylight as a circle, it cannot be an accurate earth map.