kauranos wrote:Now I wonder why Pliny described what was obvious to everyone , that “heavenly fire is spit forth by the planet as a crackling charcoal flies from a burning log.” Would he write in a textbook for Romans that the Moon is yellow and has rings on its surface? That the sea is composed of water which moves up and down?
Pliny wrote very much after the fact. As you remarked, "The evidence is that in Pliny's time , Jupiter was distant , maybe with rings..." But the older sources Pliny probably had access to, be they Latin or Greek, detailed such phenomenon commonly.
They observed the rings and the bands at a time Jupiter was much closer to the earth. By Pliny's time, it was not so. It was the older sources, specifically from the period of 1500 BCE through ~700 BCE, that detail the activity of Jupiter and its plethora of arcing plasma events. Pliny needed to repeat this for his audience because those spectacular events of the past were no longer occurring, yet the memory of what had occurred was still as fresh in Pliny's day as the time it happened. This knowledge has been mostly purged from modern science (the main exception being Chicxulub), following Lyell, by means of its false a-priori adherence to the doctrine of uniformity.
The thunderbolts of the gods were intense glow-arc plasma phenomenon. While there is still some debate as to whether they originated from past high-intensity solar outbursts (Peratt, van der Sluijs, Schoch, among others), or from plasma discharge events caused by close approaches/breakup of the ancient Jupiter-Saturn-Venus-Mars-Earth 'planetary shish-kabob' (Talbott, Thornill, Cardona, Cochrane, among others), the fact that these high-energy-density plasmas were both observed and recorded by people in antiquity is beyond dispute. This confirms, in my mind, Velikovsky's 1950's proposition:
The ancient skies were radically different to today's sky. We add to that supposition the additional information unknown to Velikovsky at the time: specifically by measure of intense plasma events recorded by ancient peoples worldwide.
Figure 1. Thunderbolts of the Gods. Sourced from ancient Greece, Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, Mexico, etc.
Figure 2. Plasma discharge phenomenon. Sourced from Peratt's high-energy plasma discharge experiments.

kauranos wrote:If a planet was historically close enough for the naked eye to see details then it would qualify as a 2nd moon ( small size) but is there any description like that? When it gradually came into near orbit , who could identify it as originating from outer-orbit?
And the other way when it departed to where it is now?
They were so close that ancient civilisations were able to record
its moons. They were called "the sons of god" or the "assembly of the gods". The story of Saturn devouring his children was just that: the titanic planet utterly annihilating some of its orbiting moons in the past, the debris of which now populate the asteroid belt. Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels, 1726, using a still-unknown source, placed in the mouth of the Liliputian people that Mars had 2 moons. This was some 151 years before Asaph Hall's 1877 'discovery' of Mars' two moons. The question everyone has asked since was, "How did Jonathan Swift know?" Simple. He used a source which dated back to or incorporated data from a time when Mars
was observed in closer proximity to earth, including observations of its twin moons, because the skies were different then.
Here are some sample images of earth's perspective of the ancient sky:
Figure 3: Saturn, behind, the ancient Polar Sun. Venus flaring. Mars in front. Left, computer modelled image. Right, from Babylon.
Figure 4: Morphed Saturn variant. Venus flaring, Mars in front. Left, computer modelled image. Right, from Buddhism.
Figure 5: Morphed Venus variant. Mars in front. Left, computer modelled image. Right, from Aztecs.
Figure 6: Saturnian configuration, side on computer-modelled image.
Figure 7. Bull of Heaven/Cosmic Mountain. Left, computer modelled image. Right, Greek Atlas.
Figure 8. Axis Mundi (Tree of Life, Axis of Creation, Cosmic Mountain), Babylon.
Figure 9: Atlas (Greek pottery)
Figure 10: Bull of Heaven. Computer modelled image.
Figure 11: Bull of Heaven (Egypt)

I will admit none of these images refer to Jupiter (a weakness in Talbot/Thornill/Cardona's model) and I cannot source any images, computer generated or otherwise, of Jupiter in formation, other than the image I screencapped above from Jno Cook's
The Jupiter Myth which displays artistic representations of Jupiter's bands.