How do you know the earth is rotating on its axis

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Explanation:

You can watch the sun wheel across the sky during the day, and the stars at night. Focus a telescope on any star besides the north star--especially southern stars--and you can watch them drift across your field of view.

An alternative explanation is that all the stars are painted on (or holes in) some canopy that rotates around the earth. This explanation does not account for the motion of the "wanderers," or planets, as the Greeks called them, or for the path of the moon among the stars.

As we know the stars are massive bodies of significant and varying distance to the earth, the notion they all swing around us in unison seems highly implausible