Flat Earth Follies: Nikon P900 Superzoom: FLAT EARTH PROVEN- Superdome Seen From 26.55 Miles Away

The claim:

Nikon P900 Superzoom: FLAT EARTH PROVEN- Superdome Seen From 26.55 Miles Away

The "evidence":

A blurry white splotch in a shitty P900 video:

Figure 1. I'm pretty sure I see bigfoot in this image (why is all their evidence blurry?)

Wow, that's pretty incontrovertible, I can see why Flat Earthers immediately scream "FLAT!"

Figure 2. Google Earth Eagle's Eye View - 26.45 miles

I get 26.45 miles (139656 feet), but ok.  But that's a LOT of city missing to get to the Superdome.

Here is what our skyline should look like from this angle, according to Google Earth.

Figure 3. Skyline From This Viewpoint

Let's sketch out the skyline from the video in this frame:

And now we can scale and overlay our skyline

The Superdome is 253 feet high so yeah, refraction would be required to bend light towards the Earth because it is, generally speaking, more dense.

I freely admit that without refraction you wouldn't be able to see the Superdome from here -- but we DO have an atmosphere and it varies in density vertically and this causes Refraction.

If you could see the BASE of the buildings along Lake Pontchartrain then I would be worried, but Flat Earth is missing 100's of feet with no possible explanation -- Refraction bends light downwards which accounts for being able to see further than expected.

What you need to do is take time lapse videos of this view and see how the Refraction varies with conditions, that would give you a better.

If you want to TRY to estimate this with Refraction you can use ATY's 'Calculating Altitudes of Distant Objects'.  I can only throw sample values at this because I don't know the conditions at the time of observation.

For Observer at 82°F, Height 5 feet, 1°C/km lapse rate, Target Height 250 feet we get 2.86 minutes of arc which is about 117 feet of deflection at 139656 feet.

Which makes it effectively 253+117=370 feet -- the video suggests refraction was perhaps slightly greater than this but not by much because that's about what we see.

The "dome" is extremely flattened in this video also, so there are likely other refractive effects between the viewer and the dome.