[Everette Graham]

I live in North Carolina. Recently, I flew out to New Haven, Connecticut, to visit family and decided to take some photos along the way that unequivocally demonstrate the rotundity of this planet. Here's one out of the batch.



Here are the specifics for those who care: I took Avelo flight XP676 from RDU to HVN on Nov 21, 2024. Here is a playback of the flight from Flightradar24. I took this image with my iPhone 15 Pro Back "Main" Camera with a 6.765 mm focal length (which provides the same FOV as a 24 mm lens on a 35 mm full-frame camera) at f/1.78.

The full EXIF data for this photo are available here.

What you see here is the curvature of the Earth. But, just to further verify, with my image's altitude and FOV information, I also wanted to toss this into Walter Bislin's "Finding the Curvature of the Earth" app to see how it aligns, and it is beautifully exact. 



I would like to say, before anyone from the FE side of this forum responds, please ask yourself: "What evidence could ever change my mind?" Because here, I am certain, we have photographic proof that is even further verified by external data and a predictive model. I only care to discuss with people who are interested in evidence and truth. I am not interested in a discussion with apologists who make it their life's mission to defend their beliefs and conclusions at all costs. I do not care for preconceived narratives, nor will I spend time entertaining them.

If there's any other helpful information I can provide to clarify or support this, I'm more than willing and happy to do so.

[stevecanuck]

Hello,

Although I'm a fellow roundy, such photos do not prove that the earth is a ball. If the earth were flat and round (like a circular throw rug), your picture would look the same.

To see what I mean, take a basketball and a picture of a basketball and have someone hold them up. The profile will look the same.

[Everette Graham]

Hello,

Although I'm a fellow roundy, such photos do not prove that the earth is a ball. If the earth were flat and round (like a circular throw rug), your picture would look the same.

To see what I mean, take a basketball and a picture of a basketball and have someone hold them up. The profile will look the same.

Thanks, but I don’t really understand how your basketball analogy makes much sense here. On a flat, circular plane, as you get to higher altitudes, you wouldn’t see a consistent curve everywhere you look. You’d start to see the edges of the disc coming into view, which would create an outward-curving effect, maybe even elliptical distortion as you looked toward the edge. At high enough altitudes, you’d essentially be looking at the entire flat circle from above—basic geometry. My photo shows you a clear downward curvature that is perfectly consistent with a spherical Earth. It matched the predictions for Earth on the Walter Bislin tool when I typed in the altitude and FOV. It’s not just a visual artifact. I’m sorry, but if the Earth were flat, the measurements and my curvature here simply wouldn’t align with reality. And I think your basketball analogy is problematic because basketballs are 3D spheres, so naturally, their profile will always show consistent curvature. But if you compare this to your throw rug and view it from any angle other than directly above, you’ll notice that the curvature rate doesn’t behave the same way. The rate of curvature would change depending on where you were and how you were looking at it. It doesn’t curve downward and uniformly like the horizon in my photo. A flat surface, or even a circular one, cannot produce the consistent, measurable curvature I have here. If the Earth were flat, you would need to explain why this curvature is visible at all and why it aligns so precisely with spherical models. Sorry if I misunderstood anything you were saying, please correct me if I did. The way I interpreted your response didn’t quite add up.

[Action80]

Fact of the matter is, you cannot determine whether the earth is a sphere by observations at the height you claim. Furthermore, the lens distorts the image.

[DuncanDoenitz]

Fact of the matter is, you cannot determine whether the earth is a sphere by observations at the height you claim. Furthermore, the lens distorts the image.

Exactly thus. 

[Everette Graham]

Fact of the matter is, you cannot determine whether the earth is a sphere by observations at the height you claim. Furthermore, the lens distorts the image.

This simply is not true. If you had cared to look into my post or any details regarding it, you wouldn't make this comment. I am not going to entertain dishonest discussions. Furthermore, if the lens was causing Earth to curve at a rate that precisely matches our expectations at this altitude, the wing of the plane would be curving with it.

[DuncanDoenitz]

It does not match my expectations.  At cruising height, and this range, I would expect the horizon to appear flat; the amount of curvature of the globe-Earth would be imperceptible; any curvature that can be perceived is due to optical effects of the camera lens and the aircraft window. 

And the wing actually is curved (trust me, I'm an aircraft engineer).  The fact that you cannot identify that curvature supports my case. 

And I'm also a roundy btw. 

[Action80]

Fact of the matter is, you cannot determine whether the earth is a sphere by observations at the height you claim. Furthermore, the lens distorts the image.

I am not going to entertain dishonest discussions.

If you do not want to entertain dishonest discussions, then do not start them by posting nonsense.

[Everette Graham]

And the wing actually is curved (trust me, I'm an aircraft engineer).  The fact that you cannot identify that curvature supports my case.

I never said plane wings were not curved. You need to pay attention to what I said. What I said was the plane wing would be curving WITH Earth.

the amount of curvature of the globe-Earth would be imperceptible

This is just not true. There is a reason my image aligned perfectly with Walter Bislin's app. At nearly 33,000 feet, you would see curvature. Would it be very prominent? No. Would it be there? Yes.

I would expect the horizon to appear flat

You expect a curving horizon to appear flat from ten thousand meters? 

It does not match my expectations.

Perhaps consider your personal expectations do not align with calculated expectations using real math and data?

[Action80]

Your problem is misidentifying the horizon and (to quote your own OP), you are an, "apologist who makes it their life's mission to defend their beliefs and conclusions at all costs."

There surely is some Round Earth forum you can go to post your nonsense, correct?

[RonJ]

There surely is some Round Earth forum you can go to post your nonsense, correct?

Most likely not correct.  I did some searching but didn't come up a site where the subject of a round earth was the main discussion objective.  Perhaps I didn't search in the correct location.  Some of my search efforts directed me back to the flat earth societies' Wiki.  There are some discussions on Reddit but nothing that was very meaningful. 


Perhaps you know of a site where the major forum theme is 'The earth is round' ?


As for the pictures out of the window of an airplane...The solution is to take a series of pictures.  Start at something like 10,000 feet and then 20,000 and so on up to the max cruising altitude.  Then you can compare all the pictures when you get home.  If there's a little more curvature in the max altitude picture than the one at 10,000 feet you can use that for your proof and the aircraft window factor would be compensated for.  It would be difficult to conclusively show much curvature below 40 or 50 thousand feet.  Most airliners don't usually get that high very often.  There are pictures out there from military aircraft that do show curvature, but they don't usually show the series of pictures and that gives the flat earthers a little wiggle room and they shout, 'aircraft window distortion every time'. 

[stevecanuck]

Hello,

Although I'm a fellow roundy, such photos do not prove that the earth is a ball. If the earth were flat and round (like a circular throw rug), your picture would look the same.

To see what I mean, take a basketball and a picture of a basketball and have someone hold them up. The profile will look the same.

Thanks, but I don’t really understand how your basketball analogy makes much sense here. On a flat, circular plane, as you get to higher altitudes, you wouldn’t see a consistent curve everywhere you look. You’d start to see the edges of the disc coming into view, which would create an outward-curving effect, maybe even elliptical distortion as you looked toward the edge. At high enough altitudes, you’d essentially be looking at the entire flat circle from above—basic geometry. My photo shows you a clear downward curvature that is perfectly consistent with a spherical Earth. It matched the predictions for Earth on the Walter Bislin tool when I typed in the altitude and FOV. It’s not just a visual artifact. I’m sorry, but if the Earth were flat, the measurements and my curvature here simply wouldn’t align with reality. And I think your basketball analogy is problematic because basketballs are 3D spheres, so naturally, their profile will always show consistent curvature. But if you compare this to your throw rug and view it from any angle other than directly above, you’ll notice that the curvature rate doesn’t behave the same way. The rate of curvature would change depending on where you were and how you were looking at it. It doesn’t curve downward and uniformly like the horizon in my photo. A flat surface, or even a circular one, cannot produce the consistent, measurable curvature I have here. If the Earth were flat, you would need to explain why this curvature is visible at all and why it aligns so precisely with spherical models. Sorry if I misunderstood anything you were saying, please correct me if I did. The way I interpreted your response didn’t quite add up.

Let's try a different tack.

• If you have a globe, take a bowl, turn it upsidedown, and place it on the globe such that the rim touches the globe all the way around.
• Get a marker and describe a perfect circle around the rim of the bowl.
• Remove the bowl.
• Place a micoscopic person (keeping things to scale as if a real person were on the globe) at the center of the circle.
• Levitate the little person until they're high enough to see the circle, but not beyond it.
• Rotate him/her 360 degrees (but not too fast, or they'll get dizzy).
• What they will see is the circle on the globe (but not beyond it) at every angle.
• Once you get that image in mind, you will realize that that is what you saw at 33,000 feet, except you were unable to see it all 360 degrees.

Let me know what you think if you actually give this a good long think.

[DuncanDoenitz]

As for the pictures out of the window of an airplane...The solution is to take a series of pictures.  Start at something like 10,000 feet and then 20,000 and so on up to the max cruising altitude.  Then you can compare all the pictures when you get home.  If there's a little more curvature in the max altitude picture than the one at 10,000 feet you can use that for your proof and the aircraft window factor would be compensated for.  It would be difficult to conclusively show much curvature below 40 or 50 thousand feet.  Most airliners don't usually get that high very often.  There are pictures out there from military aircraft that do show curvature, but they don't usually show the series of pictures and that gives the flat earthers a little wiggle room and they shout, 'aircraft window distortion every time'.

Good starting point Ron, but 2 considerations;

1.  You'd need a mechanism to ensure that your camera is in precisely the same position and centre-of-image for each exposure, and ensure that your camera (phone, whatever) is using precisely the same focal length. 

2.  The focal length of the aircraft window is not constant.  If you've never seen an aircraft undergoing a pressurisation test on the ground, you'd be surprised at how much the windows bulge and distort.  The higher the pressure differential, the greater the distortion. 

And just another point on Everette's suggestion about the shape of the wing as a reference.  It's a non-starter.  There is no way that a passenger (or even the pilot, for that matter) can know the present curvature of the wing.  The wing is constantly flexing due to normal acceleration ("g") and as the auto flight control system moves the ailerons and spoilers for gust alleviation. 

[stevecanuck]

As for the pictures out of the window of an airplane...The solution is to take a series of pictures.  Start at something like 10,000 feet and then 20,000 and so on up to the max cruising altitude.  Then you can compare all the pictures when you get home.  If there's a little more curvature in the max altitude picture than the one at 10,000 feet you can use that for your proof and the aircraft window factor would be compensated for.  It would be difficult to conclusively show much curvature below 40 or 50 thousand feet.  Most airliners don't usually get that high very often.  There are pictures out there from military aircraft that do show curvature, but they don't usually show the series of pictures and that gives the flat earthers a little wiggle room and they shout, 'aircraft window distortion every time'.

Good starting point Ron, but 2 considerations;

1.  You'd need a mechanism to ensure that your camera is in precisely the same position and centre-of-image for each exposure, and ensure that your camera (phone, whatever) is using precisely the same focal length. 

2.  The focal length of the aircraft window is not constant.  If you've never seen an aircraft undergoing a pressurisation test on the ground, you'd be surprised at how much the windows bulge and distort.  The higher the pressure differential, the greater the distortion. 

And just another point on Everette's suggestion about the shape of the wing as a reference.  It's a non-starter.  There is no way that a passenger (or even the pilot, for that matter) can know the present curvature of the wing.  The wing is constantly flexing due to normal acceleration ("g") and as the auto flight control system moves the ailerons and spoilers for gust alleviation.

You're answering as though it's possible to determine if the earth is round based on the OP. It isn't. The 'curvature' is simply the arc that is described around a center point. Put a compass (not the type that points north, but the geometry tool used to draw circles) on a globe and use it to draw a circle. That circle represents the distance to the horizon from the center of the circle. The higher you are above the center point, the farther away the horizon is, but it will always have the same feature, which is that it's an arc - and that is what you see when you see 'curvature'.

Nobody on this forum seems to understand that - be they an RE'er or an FE'er.

[DuncanDoenitz]

Thanks Ron.  In no way am I advocating this experiment as a means of determining Earth's form, I'm just pointing out a further fallacy in the rather simplistic concept that amateur photography through an airliner window can add anything robust to the debate. 

[Pete Svarrior]

Everette, instead of uploading a clearly altered JPEG and a separate link to EXIF data (which had already expired), could you just, y'know, share the original photo? I strongly suspect you've made mutliple errors here, but you didn't provide enough data to scrutinise your work either way.

Also, crucially: if you want to be treated like an adult, you need to start acting like one. You've got a group of people who would normally jump at any opportunity to cheerlead for the RE crowd telling you you're wrong, and explaining why. You need to evaluate what they have to say, not just repeatedly state that you're bemused by it. Similarly, it would have been good if you familiarised yourself with previous discussions on this subject. Believe it or not, you're not the first person to take a commercial flight, and the question of how much curvature should or shouldn't be seen in either model is a stale subject. Stop acting like everything you do is special and unique, and start learning from those around you.

This is important if you want to make any progress here. Self-important declarations of who you will and will not talk to, as well as silly demands like "ask yourself what would convince you" just won't fly here. This is especially frustrating when you profoundly declare yourself to "not care for preconceived narratives", and then spend your entire time in this thread whinging about your own preconceived narratives. I'll start by politely asking that you never do that again. As I'm sure you know by now, these requests will get progressively less polite if needed.

Most likely not correct.  I did some searching but didn't come up a site where the subject of a round earth was the main discussion objective.

Metabunk. Please go to Metabunk. They'll love you there.

[RonJ]

You're answering as though it's possible to determine if the earth is round based on the OP. It isn't. The 'curvature' is simply the arc that is described around a center point. Put a compass (not the type that points north, but the geometry tool used to draw circles) on a globe and use it to draw a circle. That circle represents the distance to the horizon from the center of the circle. The higher you are above the center point, the farther away the horizon is, but it will always have the same feature, which is that it's an arc - and that is what you see when you see 'curvature'.

I will agree it would be quite difficult (if not impossible) for you to determine the earth's shape based upon some simple pictures from an aircraft's window.  There are too many variables and not enough controls.  If you take a compass and draw a circle on a sphere you are correct the higher you are above the center point, the farther away the horizon will be.  However, there will be an altitude above the center point where the horizon will be larger than the diameter of the sphere and at that point you won't always have the same features as at a lower altitude.  For the most part you just won't get high enough for this to happen.  What you would see above a sphere could be different than what you would see above a flat disk.  Imagine if you took an airplane ride above a flat disk near the edge.  The circle you would draw outlining the horizon would go off the edge at a much lower altitude than above a sphere, where it wouldn't matter where you were.  Near the edge of a disk the visible horizon would look radically different where part would be off the edge and part would above the earth.  This could be a perfect opportunity for the flat earth crowd to verify their FE thesis by simply chartering an aircraft flight to the South Pole and getting them to go to maybe 30,000 feet and it would be very possible that they could easily see the edge of the earth disk, if it does exist.  Of course, when the edge wasn't spotted the infinite earth argument would be trotted out.

Someone that probably has some interesting pictures (videos) would be 'dude perfect' who, went on a rocket ride up to at least 175,000 feet.  I believe he said that he didn't think that the earth was flat, but what would he know?

[stevecanuck]

If you take a compass and draw a circle on a sphere you are correct the higher you are above the center point, the farther away the horizon will be ...... What you would see above a sphere could be different than what you would see above a flat disk. (Snipped to highlight salient point.)

The higher you go from the surface of a sphere, the greater will be the distance to the horizon, BUT that horizon will ALWAYS be the same distance away in every direction. In other words, you will always be at the center of that visible circle.

However, if you elevate yourself above a flat circle such that you could see the entire edge, the distance to the edge would vary unless you were in the center.