another funny aspect of the pre-Hubble cosmology is the shape of the milky way. when you have a modern notion of the basic cosmological unit being the galaxy and how there are enough of them that in universe-scale modelling you can approximate them as a dusty fluid, and how they come in a lot of different shapes, it seems fine that the Milky Way is a disc and we’re somewhere in it off to one side, but in the 19th century the universe is strange
Herschel apparently counted the stars in the Milky Way, which is to say, the Universe and came to the conclusion the Sun was in the middle:
and similarly he concluded the Universe is a disc. Why should the Universe be saucer shaped and why should we live in the middle of it? Apparently the 19th century wasn’t troubled by this until about 100 years ago people in quick succession realised the Sun wasn’t the centre of the universe and then that the centre of the universe was everywhere and nowhere