If you’re tired of arguing with flat-earthers the old-fashioned way, a Reddit user has just demonstrated an infinitely cooler method with a security camera, the shadow of his garage, and a little patience.
As far as ignoring scientific evidence goes, flat-earthers probably come in first place. In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle was one of the first to suggest that Earth was round—but if the fact that no one has ever fallen off the face of the Earth isn’t enough proof, surely the photographs of our planet taken from the Moon should be.
Alas, they are not. Flat-earthers continue to exist despite the fact that a bunch of them traveled to Antarctica last year to prove their theories right, only to discover they were not (shocker). Thankfully, this latest method to discredit the conspiracy theory doesn’t involve leaving the continent. In fact, it didn’t even require the Reddit user, RedditorofReddit07, to leave their house.
Capturing an analemma
The recently posted video traces the stark corner of the shadow of a building, likely a garage, reportedly from March 2024 to March 2025. The shadow’s trail is marked by yellow dots, which at the end of the year form an asymmetrical infinity symbol or figure eight on the cement. The post is titled “Proof our planet isn’t flat.”
What we’re looking at here is the effect of an analemma, as originally reported by IFL Science. If you look up at the Sun every day (at the same time and in the same place) throughout the course of the year, you’ll see that its positions trace a figure eight—that’s an analemma. The pattern is caused by Earth’s 23.5-degree tilt and its elliptical orbit around the Sun. The Sun reaches the highest point in the analemma during the summer and its lowest point during the winter. Different times of the day as well as different latitudes on Earth produce differently shaped analemmas.
Because the positions of shadows are directly related to the position of the Sun in the sky, it makes sense that they would also follow an analemma pattern.
Standard solar system model
But how does this directly support the fact that Earth isn’t flat? After all, some people might be “pretty sure sun just doing figure eight in sky round flat earth” as Reddit user da-manimal420 (hopefully sarcastically) commented.
While RedditorofReddit07 doesn’t provide any explanation beyond the video, the bottom line seems to be that analemmas are consistent with the widely established, standard model of the solar system, in which a spherical-ish Earth orbits the Sun following an elliptical path. Flat-earthers, on the other hand, believe that Earth is the center of the universe and that the Sun circles above its surface like a flashlight shining down on a plate.
But we shouldn’t hold our breaths. I’m sure a conspiracy theorist will soon put forth an idea for how their strange model could also produce analemmas.
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