And another picture where each successive light is smaller and smaller:



Test it for yourself with a ruler.

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Offline TomInAustin

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I have to see some evidence of this "Sun looking twice as big near the horizon" claim. If anything, the Sun is either the same exact size near the horizon as it was in the middle of the sky, or slightly smaller or slightly squished vertically, based on what I've seen. I don't know if a spotlight sun is widely accepted by the FE community. I certainly don't think it is a spotlight, and from what I see, there is a gradual transition from day to night. The further the light travels, its color changes due to interaction with the atmosphere. Shortly after the red wavelength, it becomes invisible. The atmosphere isn't perfectly clear, it's opacity, and the distance to the light source, is what causes the darkness of night.

As for why it appears to go under the horizon seems to be chalked up to not knowing what a 300mi diameter object looks like as it goes overhead. If you watch a plane fly out over an ocean, even though it may be maintaining its altitude, it appears to be heading down to interact with the horizon before it becomes invisible due to the atmosphere. The assertion is we simply don't know how an object like the Sun would appear if it is beyond the vanishing point.


The plane also gets smaller as it flys away.  The sun stays constant for the time of year.   Why does the sun not get smaller?  Mountains get smaller as you drive away from them and they are pretty big.  The sun should be half the relative size as distance doubles.
Do you have a citation for this sweeping generalisation?

Offline 3DGeek

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The Sun DOES NOT get bigger at the horizon.  This is a variation of the extremely well known and documented "Moon Illusion"...and the answer is precisely the same in RE and FE theories - so nobody need argue about it!

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_illusion

Let me describe a SIMPLE experiment that everyone here can do.   Since it's kinda dangerous to stare at the sun - do the experiment with the moon (the result, the reason and the answer to this question is exactly the same).

When the moon is high in the sky - grab a coin - a US quarter or something similar that's about an inch across.  Stretch out your hand as far as you can reach towards the moon - and compare it's size to the coin...unless you have very short/long arms - you should be able to just about cover up the moon with your coin at full arm stretch.   But get familiar with how big the moon looks compared to that coin.

Now wait until the moon is rising or setting - and repeat the experiment.

Same exact deal with the sun - except I'm not going to tell you to stare at it - but you can do the same experiment with appropriate eye protection and because the apparent size of sun and moon are almost exactly the same (in both FE and RE) - the results are also the same.

AMAZING though it seems - the size of the moon doesn't change.   In both FE and RE theory - it's an optical illusion.  When the moon is far away from other objects who's size you know, our brains assume that it's a long way away (which it is...although more so in RE than FE)...but because daily experience doesn't prepare us for looking at things that are 3000 miles away (FE) or 300,000 miles away (RE) - our subconscious vision system assumes that it must be closer than it really is - and therefore rather small.

When the moon is close to the horizon, we are suddenly able to compare it's apparent size to things like trees and houses out near the horizon...and now it's very clear that this thing is ENORMOUS - because it's so much bigger than a tree or a house.   Our brains adjust accordingly...and the sun/moon looks MUCH larger...some would say twice or even three times larger...but the coin experiment says otherwise.  It's the same exact size.

So in both RE and FE, the "change in size" of sun and moon when they're close to the horizon is an optical illusion - and one that you can check for yourself with two quick observations and no tool fancier than a coin.

We should put this one to bed - it's the same deal in RE and FE - it's explainable and testable by trivial means - it's not even worth further debate.  I beg you to do the experiment yourself before you argue *any* more!

(CAVEATS:

1) There is a TINY amount of atmospheric distortion/mirage that happens over about a 1/4 of the sun's diameter as it rises or sets in some weather conditions - which results in that bulge it seems to have right when it touches the horizon.
2) In RE theory - the sun and moon are about 1.2% SMALLER at the horizon because they are each further away by the radius of the earth than they are at noon...1.2% is too small to measure without instruments...so this isn't a way to easily dismiss FE theory...and in any case, the distance to the FE moon varies too.)

Do the experiment with the coin - and you'll see immediately what I mean - and we can perhaps put this thread to rest.

The Wiki is wrong though - and the coin test proves it.

« Last Edit: May 26, 2017, 02:55:54 PM by 3DGeek »
Hey Tom:  What path do the photons take from the physical location of the sun to my eye at sunset?

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Offline Pete Svarrior

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Your results are consistent with the Flat Earth model. The apparent magnification of the Sun is nullified by the real change in distance between the observer and the Sun. The very fact that you can't perceive a difference attests to that.
Read the FAQ before asking your question - chances are we already addressed it.
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Offline 3DGeek

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Your results are consistent with the Flat Earth model. The apparent magnification of the Sun is nullified by the real change in distance between the observer and the Sun. The very fact that you can't perceive a difference attests to that.
Yes - as I explained - the results of my "coin-at-arms-length" experiment are identical for FE and RE.  Neither is proved nor disproved.

All I'm saying is that the vociferous debates about "How does the sun get bigger if it's setting" are entirely, 100% incorrect on both sides of the debate here...because the sun doesn't get bigger when it's setting - and you can do the experiment to prove it, yourself, tonight, very easily.

It is however, a very strong optical illusion and nearly everyone believes it's a real effect until they do the experiment for themselves.
Hey Tom:  What path do the photons take from the physical location of the sun to my eye at sunset?

Your results are consistent with the Flat Earth model. The apparent magnification of the Sun is nullified by the real change in distance between the observer and the Sun. The very fact that you can't perceive a difference attests to that.
Yes - as I explained - the results of my "coin-at-arms-length" experiment are identical for FE and RE.  Neither is proved nor disproved.

All I'm saying is that the vociferous debates about "How does the sun get bigger if it's setting" are entirely, 100% incorrect on both sides of the debate here...because the sun doesn't get bigger when it's setting - and you can do the experiment to prove it, yourself, tonight, very easily.

It is however, a very strong optical illusion and nearly everyone believes it's a real effect until they do the experiment for themselves.

However, the fact that the sun does not get smaller disproves the flat earth model, as there is no such thing as a magnification effect due to the greater amount of atmosphere between us and the sun at sunrise and sunset.

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Offline rabinoz

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Your results are consistent with the Flat Earth model. The apparent magnification of the Sun is nullified by the real change in distance between the observer and the Sun. The very fact that you can't perceive a difference attests to that.
Yes - as I explained - the results of my "coin-at-arms-length" experiment are identical for FE and RE.  Neither is proved nor disproved.

All I'm saying is that the vociferous debates about "How does the sun get bigger if it's setting" are entirely, 100% incorrect on both sides of the debate here...because the sun doesn't get bigger when it's setting - and you can do the experiment to prove it, yourself, tonight, very easily.

It is however, a very strong optical illusion and nearly everyone believes it's a real effect until they do the experiment for themselves.

However, the fact that the sun does not get smaller disproves the flat earth model, as there is no such thing as a magnification effect due to the greater amount of atmosphere between us and the sun at sunrise and sunset.
I would claim that the "magnification effect" is simply glare and can be removed with a suitable filter that can show the sharp disk of the sun.

Have a look at this thread The Constancy of the Angular size of the Sun.
Here is a bit of the OP:
Now on Youtube there is a video made by a the Flat Earther, Matrix Decode with very good photos of the sun through a filter (an arc welder's glass) showing the sun at a number of times of day from 9:30 AM to 7:00 PM on 9/March/2016 in Malaga, Spain.

The following screen shots from his video does an excellent job of proving that the sun size does not change!
         
       


Do I need to say more? Our kind Flat Earther, Matrix Decode, has said it all!

The "sun does not appear to change its size until just before sunset" - a then only a little in height!

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Offline Tom Bishop

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Here is another picture of streetlights receding into the distance:



This picture is even clearer as each successive streetlight is smaller in the image until the smallest ones are about 10% of the size of the largest and closest light. Once again there is clearly a lens effect making all of the lights appear larger than they are, as the first light is about the same size in diameter as the height of the woman in the foreground. There are no streetlights with 5 foot diameter lightbulbs. But in the meantime, the lights get progressively smaller as they recede into the distance, just as the mechanism of perspective suggests will happen. There is clearly no magnification effect happening to the lights in the distance as each light is smaller than the next closer light.

The best way to measure this is to download the picture and then zoom the picture to 400% on your computer screen. At that level of zoom, the differences are obvious to the naked eye, and can also be easily measured with a ruler.

The final 7 or so lights in that sequence look pretty similar in size, despite being spaced as far away from each other than the first four lights.

Lights very near to you are going to look bigger if they are also angled more directly at you, or because their light is physically bigger than its projection. A streetlight which is located a distance one centimeter from your eyeball will, of course, look bigger than a streetlight in the distance. In these discussions we are primarily concerned with very distant lights. We can see that the very distant lights in that scene are not consistently shrinking. The shrinking seems to slow significantly as the distance increases. This is evidence of a magnification effect.

In the case of the sun, the sun already starts off pretty distant from you when it is overhead and then gets even more distant when it is traveling away from you. It is never in the near field like a streetlight might be.
« Last Edit: May 29, 2017, 08:34:48 PM by Tom Bishop »

Here is another picture of streetlights receding into the distance:



This picture is even clearer as each successive streetlight is smaller in the image until the smallest ones are about 10% of the size of the largest and closest light. Once again there is clearly a lens effect making all of the lights appear larger than they are, as the first light is about the same size in diameter as the height of the woman in the foreground. There are no streetlights with 5 foot diameter lightbulbs. But in the meantime, the lights get progressively smaller as they recede into the distance, just as the mechanism of perspective suggests will happen. There is clearly no magnification effect happening to the lights in the distance as each light is smaller than the next closer light.

The best way to measure this is to download the picture and then zoom the picture to 400% on your computer screen. At that level of zoom, the differences are obvious to the naked eye, and can also be easily measured with a ruler.

The final 7 or so lights in that sequence look pretty similar in size, despite being as far away from each other than the first four lights.

Lights very near to you are going to look bigger if they are also angled more directly at you, or because their light is physically bigger than its projection. In these discussions we are really looking at very distant lights. We can see that the very distant lights in that scene are not consistently shrinking. The shrinking seems to slow significantly as the distance increases.

You know Tom, it would help your case if you posted something that was actually true. If you followed my suggestion and blew the picture up to 400%, and then measured the lights with a ruler, you would have quickly discovered that the the final 7 or so lights are not similar in size. In fact, they decrease consistently as they get further away.

You suggestion that the closer lights are somehow angled at the viewer is ridiculous. Why would someone install a series of streetlights at different angles? And why would they angle some of them to effectively blind someone driving down the street?

As for the closer lights being physically bigger than their "projection", this is also ridiculous. The first light in the series is almost as big as the woman walking beneath it. Have you ever seen a 4 foot diameter lightbulb on a regular streetlight? The reason all of the lights look bigger than their physical bulbs is lens flare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_flare Again, in one of the earlier pictures, the headlights of a car appear to be about 5 feet in diameter. That is not due to the car having huge headlights. It is due to lens flare, which in that case is increased by the headlights being angled directly at the lens of the camera.

These lights get smaller and smaller as they get further away in the picture. The sun does not get smaller as it sets. Even if there was some magnification effect (which is not proven by this picture or any other picture posted on here), it clearly is not enough to keep something appearing the exact same size even as it moves thousands of miles further away from the viewer.

You say, "The shrinking seems to slow significantly as the distance increases." Then how do you explain that in the case of the sun the shrinking does not happen at all? We are not talking about a sun that shrinks more slowly as the distance to it increases: we are talking about a sun that never shrinks at all. The most distant streetlights are 10% or less  of the size of the closer streetlights. The sun is 100% as large when it sets, even though the sun is many thousands of times as far away in the flat earth model as the lights in this picture.
« Last Edit: May 29, 2017, 08:56:37 PM by Nirmala »

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Offline Tom Bishop

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You know Tom, it would help your case if you posted something that was actually true. If you followed my suggestion and blew the picture up to 400%, and then measured the lights with a ruler, you would have quickly discovered that the the final 7 or so lights are not similar in size. In fact, they decrease consistently as they get further away.

The shrinking is not consistent, and appears to slow significantly when compared to the closest lights.

Quote
You suggestion that the closer lights are somehow angled at the viewer is ridiculous. Why would someone install a series of streetlights at different angles? And why would they angle some of them to effectively blind someone driving down the street?

Is a streetlight directly overhead of you pointing at you with the same angle as a streetlight at the eye level horizon? No, it is not.

Quote
As for the closer lights being physically bigger than their "projection", this is also ridiculous. The first light in the series is almost as big as the woman walking beneath it. Have you ever seen a 4 foot diameter lightbulb on a regular streetlight? The reason all of the lights look bigger than their physical bulbs is lens flare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_flare Again, in one of the earlier pictures, the headlights of a car appear to be about 5 feet in diameter. That is not due to the car having huge headlights. It is due to lens flare, which in that case is increased by the headlights being angled directly at the lens of the camera.

There is your explanation then, you admitted that the light sizes in your image are tainted by lens flare.

You know Tom, it would help your case if you posted something that was actually true. If you followed my suggestion and blew the picture up to 400%, and then measured the lights with a ruler, you would have quickly discovered that the the final 7 or so lights are not similar in size. In fact, they decrease consistently as they get further away.

The shrinking is not consistent, and appears to slow significantly when compared to the closest lights.

Quote
You suggestion that the closer lights are somehow angled at the viewer is ridiculous. Why would someone install a series of streetlights at different angles? And why would they angle some of them to effectively blind someone driving down the street?

Is a streetlight directly overhead of you pointing at you with the same angle as a streetlight at the eye level horizon? No, it is not.

Quote
As for the closer lights being physically bigger than their "projection", this is also ridiculous. The first light in the series is almost as big as the woman walking beneath it. Have you ever seen a 4 foot diameter lightbulb on a regular streetlight? The reason all of the lights look bigger than their physical bulbs is lens flare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_flare Again, in one of the earlier pictures, the headlights of a car appear to be about 5 feet in diameter. That is not due to the car having huge headlights. It is due to lens flare, which in that case is increased by the headlights being angled directly at the lens of the camera.

There is your explanation then, you admitted that the light sizes in your image are tainted by lens flare.

So again, you admit that the distant lights do get smaller and smaller. At no point either near or far do the lights stay the same size in any of the pictures. Why then does the sun not get any smaller when it is much more distant? Why would the magnification effect be greater on the sun than it is on the streetlights?

As for the angle of the streetlights changing with greater distance, that is true, and it does explain why the shape of the images of the lights appears to be less round with increasing distance. But the same thing would be true if the sun was effectively a spotlight as the flat earth model requires. The shape of the sun should change with increasing distance just as the size should change. Neither the sun's shape nor it's size changes with increasing distance.

Lens flare affects all of the lights in all of the pictures including the ones in the Wiki. And still all of the lights get gradually smaller as the distance increases, even though all of their images are affected by lens flare. So lens flare does magnify all of the lights and makes them appear larger than they really are at all distances, but it does not explain why the sun appears the same size at varying distances. Lens flare as the name implies happens in the lens of the camera, so the effect would be the same for every light at every distance.

There still is clearly no evidence in the Wiki and in the photos I have posted for the so called magnification effect.

When I measure the second and fourth lights on the left side of the image, there is a roughly 50% reduction in size of the image.

When I measure the last visible light on the right side and also the light two lights closer, there is roughly a 50% reduction in size of the image.

So the same amount of reduction occurs in a row of three streetlights that are closer as in a row of three streetlights that are further away.

There is no gradual change in the amount of reduction suggesting that the more distant lights get smaller at a slower rate.

Offline 3DGeek

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You know Tom, it would help your case if you posted something that was actually true. If you followed my suggestion and blew the picture up to 400%, and then measured the lights with a ruler, you would have quickly discovered that the the final 7 or so lights are not similar in size. In fact, they decrease consistently as they get further away.

The shrinking is not consistent, and appears to slow significantly when compared to the closest lights.

Quote
You suggestion that the closer lights are somehow angled at the viewer is ridiculous. Why would someone install a series of streetlights at different angles? And why would they angle some of them to effectively blind someone driving down the street?

Is a streetlight directly overhead of you pointing at you with the same angle as a streetlight at the eye level horizon? No, it is not.

Quote
As for the closer lights being physically bigger than their "projection", this is also ridiculous. The first light in the series is almost as big as the woman walking beneath it. Have you ever seen a 4 foot diameter lightbulb on a regular streetlight? The reason all of the lights look bigger than their physical bulbs is lens flare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens_flare Again, in one of the earlier pictures, the headlights of a car appear to be about 5 feet in diameter. That is not due to the car having huge headlights. It is due to lens flare, which in that case is increased by the headlights being angled directly at the lens of the camera.

There is your explanation then, you admitted that the light sizes in your image are tainted by lens flare.

There are a couple of reasons why the lights don't appear to get smaller.

1) The "blooming" of the light happens in part due to the atmosphere but in part due to the lens or even our eyelashes.  The "star" shape around each light demonstrates that this is happening.  Because the blooming happens up close - it's not subject to the laws of perspective...it's happening "in our eyes" or "in the camera".    You can prove this to yourself very easily by tilting your head (or the camera) to one side and noticing that all of those starburst effects rotate with your head/camera.  This cannot be due to the propagation of light from the source to your eye/camera because the light source has no way to "know" how you tilted your head.

2) For VERY distant lights, the problem becomes that neither the camera, nor your eye, has infinite resolution.  Your eye has rod and cone cells that are just that big...and the camera has light sensitive diodes that are whatever size.    So anything smaller than that doesn't seem to get smaller - it just gets dimmer...however, at night, when your eyes (or your camera) are adapted to the darkness - even a fairly dim light will seem really bright against the night sky.  So there is indeed a distance beyond which a very SMALL light will get no bigger.

HOWEVER: Neither of these effects could explain a larger sun at the horizon because (a) you're looking at a clean, circular disk with no obvious "starbursting" effects and (b) it's FAR larger than the limits of your eye/cameras's resolution.

So neither of these rather well known effects can explain this.

Either the sun really is at the same distance from the viewer at noon and at sunset...or you're in need of another explanation...and one that works for airplanes, clouds and the moon.


Hey Tom:  What path do the photons take from the physical location of the sun to my eye at sunset?

There's a video on YouTube with a simple explanation. I wish I could find it again...

The guy draws a picture of the sun, puts the picture on a stand. He fills a glass of water and puts the glass of water in front of the stand with the picture of the sun on it. The camera is in front of the glass, watching through the water, pointed directly at the sun drawing.

He drags the stand with the picture in a straight line away from the glass.

Basically, the sun remains at a constant height and remains in line with your "eye." Because the water refracts light, and is in a curved container, as the sun travels away from you, not only does it appear as if it is setting, but it also increases in size.

In a closed dome, the water in the air would have the same effect.
« Last Edit: June 09, 2017, 08:08:08 PM by MorganFreethoughtman »

My idea is similar to morgan’s. Only problem is a convex atmospheric lens with object inside the focal length will create a virtual image even bigger than itself. So the sun will become massive as it moves away as projected on the sky screen. If the sun is outside the focal length, the real image will be tiny as seen by the eye.



A better explanation, using the mirror reflection example, is a black sun reflected on a concave mirror inside the focal length of the earth. See #45. A magnified virtual image (or reflection) will be seen behind the sky as proportional even in motion. Just a theory: please someone do the experiment.