Fort Myers to Naples - Flat Earth failures continue

No amount of curvature is enough for a Flat Earther.  We can SEE the shoreline disappear, and then the bottoms of buildings.  But since they don't understand the geometry of what they see they cannot properly evaluate it.

Flat Earth once again fails to understand WHAT the horizon even is.

@captscorch @ColdDimSum @nicholaspitts @CobraElDiablo @UnCastellsMes @twatterfull @sciencegecko @skeptropolis @FlatEarthReal Still waiting on my curve pic.twitter.com/zh2zFXmMVi

— JACK (@Adidas68Jack) April 24, 2017

And a copy of the image from Jack just in case (which Jack now deleted).

I'm going to admit right here at the start that I do not know the EXACT location from which this photo was taken.  Neither does 'Jack'.  However, we both know the APPROXIMATE location to within a few miles because we can see the nearby buildings and at least their rough orientation.

But without a higher resolution image I cannot positively identify the distant buildings, and neither can Jack.  You CANNOT make out Lesina Tower in that image.  You don't see these

Through all the other buildings!?

Which Jack can supposedly  POSITIVELY ID from:

Even on a Flat Earth buildings that far away would be smaller due to perspective -- they would NOT appear the same size as the nearer buildings and you would be missing MILES of buildings from along the shoreline.

Ok -- so Jack admitted an error here.  See this is the issue -- we can ALL make errors.  We have to honestly evaluate the evidence and be willing to take input from others and come to an consensus.  I'm glad we made progress here.

@ColdDimSum @UnCastellsMes @captscorch @nicholaspitts @CobraElDiablo @twatterfull @sciencegecko @skeptropolis @FlatEarthReal Bad research on my part I am fixing the photo. Still flat.

— JACK (@Adidas68Jack) April 24, 2017

I guess since Jack is going to delete his tweets I will also include a screenshot.  My goal isn't to 'embarrass' Jack or even to win the argument -- I honestly and sincerely want to get to the truth of the matter.  I just want to document that the earlier conclusion is now clearly in question and I've updated this posting to reflect this change.

I have an error to admit also.  I thought it was ridiculous that Jack could positively ID those fuzzy little buildings but I would like to propose that I believe I have a confirmed location and I believe the correspondence is just strong enough to support my claim that these are the right buildings.

Unfortunately for Jack, that puts those buildings closer to 11.72 miles away which suggests only about 32 feet of the bottom would be hidden.

Earlier error below -- what changed was I gained additional information.  With the information I had at the time I could not reasonably place the buildings and after trying to scan 50 miles of coastline it seemed rather hopeless.  But with fresh eyes this morning I was able to locate them with much higher confidence level.

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So we don't need to know exactly know how far we're seeing to know that this view isn't seeing these buildings 42.7 miles away.  We can eliminate possibilities by evaluating the evidence we have.

I'll argue the more distant buildings are more likely in North Naples which puts them just 17.14 miles away -- *MAYBE* Naples proper at 25 miles -- but NO WAY that is 42 miles away.

Since I have no idea what the distant buildings are I cannot judge if we SHOULD see them on a Globe model or not.

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However, there is one more VITALLY important thing to get across here -- this is the very HEART of Jack's complete and utter failure and that is, JACK HAS THE WRONG GEOMETRY.

See that Red circle?  That's our HORIZON line.  That is about as far over the water as you can see and this is the LINE which Jack thinks we should see "1100' of curvature" along and that is just nonsense.  We're not seeing the shoreline 17 miles or 25 miles away -- we're seeing cutoff buildings.

Again I say WTF Jack?

That line is CUTTING ACROSS YOUR IMAGE LEFT TO RIGHT.  It's not ALONG our view, it is very clearly across it.  It is our HORIZON circle.

SEE HERE FOR FURTHER DISCUSSION

The problem is Flat Earthers are expecting to the see "the Whole Earth Curve" but that simply isn't what we can possibly see on a spheroid.  The 'arc' they are looking for is that TINY slice of the horizon circle clipped by the edges of your view.  When you are near ground level you are viewing the "Circle of the Horizon" completely on edge so, OF COURSE, it is going to "look flat".  How else can circle viewed completely on edge look?   As you get higher and higher (and IF and ONLY IF your view is wide enough) can you catch the apparent Sagitta of the horizon -- which is that little sliver of arc carved out from the edges of your field of view -- as shown here:

We can only see that much of the surface of the Earth from that low vantage point (as drawn I estimated 15' above the water -- it's slightly larger or smaller depending on the EXACT value as well as the shape of the surface of the water given tidal swell, waves, etc).  Those small features matter less as you gain altitude -- once you are about 1000' up you can ignore little things and only have to worry about larger land features like significant hills and mountains..

I don't know how I can get it through these guys skulls that your horizon is an ITTY BITTY tiny CIRCLE and the CURVATURE of the circle is the APPARENT sagitta hump and NOT the limbs of the Earth.  It's NEVER the limbs of the Earth truly (at 500+ miles up it starts to matter less).

That's why a sphere would look like this when you're about 200 miles up.

And here is what it looks like from an actual high-altitude balloon image - SAME EFFECT.  Because this is how viewing a sphere works.

image credit: AirPano

Another example - as you get closer to a sphere your horizon becomes smaller and smaller.

Now let's see what 35,000 feet would look like at Earth scale...

You are 1.67 pixels up with 57.83 pixels to the horizon out of 1000.  You see a TINY little portion of the sphere.

How big is that circle from just 15' up with the horizon about 7632.8 meters away?  That would be a circle ~1.2 pixels radius = ((1000/6378137) * 7632.8)

And just for fun, here is the view from the ISS.  This is why continents "look too big" when you see them from the ISS.  You are expecting to see them mapped to around 50% of the Earth but that isn't what the ISS could possibly see from that altitude.

Remember that 'Distance to the Horizon' is from the OBSERVER, not along the ground.  So at a million miles up the 'Distance to the Horizon' is going to be more than a million miles and we STILL would not see a full 50% of the Earth.  We ALWAYS have a Horizon line.

BTW, this is all based on very simple geometry using two Right Triangles as shown below.  The distance to the horizon for an observer at Height (h) above the surface of a sphere of Radius (R) can be found with:

    DistanceToHorizon = sqrt(ObserverHeight(ObserverHeight+2×Radius))

This comports with what we observe in reality.