Offline Tontogary

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Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« on: April 21, 2018, 03:19:57 AM »
Last night was a fantastic sunset.

I watched it and took pictures, Unfortunately not with a filter, so the glare was a bit distracting, however it is clearly seen in the pictures that the sun is going down.

I dont get how the sun gets below the horizon, perspective does not explain it, as the observable diameter of the sun horizontally does not decrease to less than what the eye can discriminate.

Refraction follows the curve of the earth, so when actually seeing it, technically the sun had set.

If the perspective were in effect, the horizontal size of the sun would get smaller and smaller, and eventually disappear. It does not.
It clearly sinks below the horizon, it does not merge into the horizon.

The wiki does not really explain it, and neither does EnaG.

I have proved in another thread that the horizon does not rise up to meet the observers eye, and if the sun was above the horizon, then it would get smaller and smaller, which it does not, as I already proved in yet another thread. All in all it should not get cut in half.

Also, if you haven't heard of bronies before, that reflects poorly on your understanding of the world that surrounds you. It's practically impossible not to know about them.

Offline Tontogary

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Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #1 on: April 21, 2018, 03:31:07 AM »
And pretty much gone........

Also, if you haven't heard of bronies before, that reflects poorly on your understanding of the world that surrounds you. It's practically impossible not to know about them.

Devils Advocate

Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #2 on: April 21, 2018, 09:03:23 AM »
Also note that even though the sun disappears the orange glow remains, surely perspective wouldn't allow this?

Offline Tontogary

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Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #3 on: April 24, 2018, 06:54:16 AM »
Anyone care to give any reasons this might happen.

It certainly is not perspective.


Also, if you haven't heard of bronies before, that reflects poorly on your understanding of the world that surrounds you. It's practically impossible not to know about them.

Offline Westprog

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Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #4 on: April 24, 2018, 07:54:08 AM »


I was intending to start a thread about sunset and perspective. It seems to me to be the most obviously wrong-headed part of FE theory. It's a palpable example of confused thinking. The idea that the sunset could be caused by perspective involves layers of mistakes, to the extent that one wonders how anyone could manage to think it's possible.

Firstly, I'd like to comment about the history of flat Earth thinking. Exactly what the early believers in a flat Earth thought is difficult to establish, but it appears likely that they believed that the Sun rotated over and under the flat Earth, exactly as it appears to do. There was no need to deal with the experience of people on the other side of the world. They were unknown quantities. There was no theory of a hovering sun, because that isn't what people saw.

When the world was explored, and modern (Newtonian and post-Newtonian) physics began to be applied, the primitive form of flat-Earth theory became impossible, and we get the modern form - as impossible to reconcile with observation as the older belief, but protected by obfuscation and confusion.

So it was no longer possible to have an orbiting Sun, once we knew that the Sun was overhead somewhere throughout the 24 hours. Instead, we have a tiny sun, a spotlight sun, hovering above the flat Earth.

This leads to two problems which seem insuperable. Such a Sun would become smaller in the sky as it moved away, and it would never be totally lost to sight. How to reconcile the theory with observation? The answer was to be found in the theory of perspective - and in particular, to misunderstand the theory of perspective.

Offline Westprog

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Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #5 on: April 24, 2018, 08:28:16 AM »
The theory of perspective is something that's often misunderstood. The problem with understanding it is that it's often described from the point of view of an artist, trying to draw a scene. This can confuse people.

Firstly, the principle of perspective is very, very simple indeed. When things are further away, they appear smaller. This is because the nearer something is, the more of the field of vision they fill. As they are further away, they fill a smaller area of the field of vision.

A secondary effect is that when looking at something further away, it will be at a lower angle.




That is the essential element of perspective. There's nothing mystical about it. It can be fully understood by very, very simple optics, and by a side on drawing showing lines of vision.



Offline Westprog

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Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #6 on: April 24, 2018, 08:47:31 AM »
Ah, but what about the vanishing point? That point at which objects vanish! Suddenly disappear, according to the laws of perspective?

This is where the obfuscation takes place. Firstly, the vanishing point is an abstraction. It's a term used in perspective drawing to describe the point on the drawing on which lines appear to converge. It's an effect which relates to parallel structures, such as the sides of buildings or railway lines. It is not an actual place in the real world. Hypothetically, it would be at an infinite distance, since parallel lines continue to be separate at infinite distance.

Oh, but wait! Things do disappear from our sight, don't they? They do vanish as they get further away? Yes, they do, but this has nothing to do with the vanishing point. Objects subtend an ever smaller angle as they move further away, until the eye is no longer powerful enough to resolve them. There are only two reasons why something disappears from sight. Either it is too far away to make out, or something gets in the way. This can readily be seen in the case of railway lines converging towards the horizon. The lines are no longer visible - but we can clearly see a mountain behind them, right at the "vanishing point". The reason we can't see the lines is because they are too far away and too small. The mountain is big, so we can still see it. However, other mountains, just a bit further away, we can't see, because the curve of the Earth is in the way.

This is a fundamental principle. We can see things if they are big enough, and bright enough, and sufficiently contrasting with the background, and if we have a clear line of sight to them. What doesn't happen is that objects move "into the vanishing point" and start to disappear from the bottom up. This is an absurdity.

Offline Westprog

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Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #7 on: April 24, 2018, 09:11:52 AM »
N.b. for the moderators - I'm dealing with this central issue in digestible chunks. This is not low-content posting, and it's all relevant to this topic. I could stick it all in one fat, indigestible post, but that would make it more difficult to follow.

So what is the flat Earth "perspective" explanation of the sunset? Here's one example, from one of the leading intellectuals of the movement pbrane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq5ixQytLXE

This is tough watching. I have to say, that about a minute in, my teeth started to hurt. Basically, pbrane is making up laws of perspective which have nothing to do with any kind of reality. His claim is that objects up in the sky don't get smaller as they are further away. How does this happen? Well, it just does.

This is such obvious, palpable nonsense that actually refuting it seems redundant. There is no reason whatsoever why looking at objects in the sky, or objects far off, should operate on different visual laws to anything else. The reason that objects far away appear smaller is obvious if we simply draw them, and draw lines from them to an observer. The angle becomes increasingly smaller.

However, even if we were to accept pbrane's nonsensical claim, this would in itself destroy the use of perspective. The entire principle of perspective rests on objects becoming smaller as they move away. That is the principle from which the concept of the "vanishing point" arises. If objects subtended the same angle as they moved away from the observer, there would be no vanishing point.

The reason we are unable to see objects when they are far away, even when there is a clear, direct line of sight to them, is that our eyes aren't able to resolve an image of the object. In general, the smaller the angle subtended by the object, the harder it is to see. However, other factors come into play. A dark object against a dark background can be harder to make out at distance than a bright object.

But this is the Sun! It's undoubtedly the brightest object that any of us regularly see. Indeed, it's too bright, even at sunset, to look at directly without damaging our eyes! So why does it disappear? It's not at the vanishing point, because objects cannot reach the vanishing point. The vanishing point is at infinity. Not only that, since the Sun remains the same size in the sky, if we were to trace perspective lines, they would not meet. pbrane simply superimposes a picture of a wall and assigns vanishing lines. You can't do that. To establish the vanishing point of an object, you trace lines that connect successive images of that object. pbrane doesn't use lines to connect successive positions of the Sun, because they wouldn't meet. (Nor would they form a straight line, but that is a moot point).

I have assumed that pbrane is not an outlier on this matter of flat-Earth perspective "theory", but I'd welcome any clarification which would try to make something coherent out of the nonsense which seems, to me, to be the most absurd and most obviously wrong part of the whole business.

Offline Tontogary

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Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #8 on: April 24, 2018, 09:51:58 AM »
Westprog, thank you for the explanation, very ”illuminating” if you pardon the pun!

I certainly could never follow the Perspective argument in EnaG, or the Wiki, it just does not make sense, and neither does half the sun disappearing at sunset, and half appearing at sunrise. That cannot be explained by perspective, or things vanishing into the horizon.

Now EnaG does make a claim that the hull of a ship (handily for him most ships were sail driven with dark hulls and white”ish” sails), hull disappears into the horizon as opposed to dropping below it, which would certainly explain why he theorised a hull may seem to blend into a horizon, which is a pretty dark line, yet the white sails stand out.

However the fact is that the hull drops below the horizon, depending on the height of the observer and the size of the vessel, so that someone standing on a cliff, or other high point, might not be able to distinguish the hull from the darker water if the vessel was small, but would see it again using a telescope. This would be at a range below the visible horizon, so for example a hieght of eye for my ship is 35M approx, and the visible horizon iOS 12 miles, but a small sailing vessel with a dark hull would be very very difficult to distinguish with the naked eye at that distance, but the sails would clearly stand out if a light colour.

The sun, of course, is bright and would not blend into the horizon.....

I did notice that there are no rebuttals to this thread so far, and would expect someone shortly to try to derail the thread and take it down an avenue that has nothing to do with explaining the pictures i posted. Let’s hope not, and i will be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t happen.

Also, if you haven't heard of bronies before, that reflects poorly on your understanding of the world that surrounds you. It's practically impossible not to know about them.

Offline Westprog

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Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #9 on: April 24, 2018, 11:05:32 AM »
Westprog, thank you for the explanation, very ”illuminating” if you pardon the pun!

I certainly could never follow the Perspective argument in EnaG, or the Wiki, it just does not make sense, and neither does half the sun disappearing at sunset, and half appearing at sunrise. That cannot be explained by perspective, or things vanishing into the horizon.

Now EnaG does make a claim that the hull of a ship (handily for him most ships were sail driven with dark hulls and white”ish” sails), hull disappears into the horizon as opposed to dropping below it, which would certainly explain why he theorised a hull may seem to blend into a horizon, which is a pretty dark line, yet the white sails stand out.

However the fact is that the hull drops below the horizon, depending on the height of the observer and the size of the vessel, so that someone standing on a cliff, or other high point, might not be able to distinguish the hull from the darker water if the vessel was small, but would see it again using a telescope. This would be at a range below the visible horizon, so for example a hieght of eye for my ship is 35M approx, and the visible horizon iOS 12 miles, but a small sailing vessel with a dark hull would be very very difficult to distinguish with the naked eye at that distance, but the sails would clearly stand out if a light colour.

The sun, of course, is bright and would not blend into the horizon.....

I did notice that there are no rebuttals to this thread so far, and would expect someone shortly to try to derail the thread and take it down an avenue that has nothing to do with explaining the pictures i posted. Let’s hope not, and i will be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t happen.

Yes, it's an important point about things vanishing into the distance (rather than the "vanishing point") - even when they can't be made out by the naked eye, they can be brought into view using a telescope, or some other magnifying device. There's no such thing as something so far away that it can't be seen. It can always be brought into view by sufficiently large magnification. Eventually, of course, that becomes no longer practicable.

There's also an issue with the atmosphere eventually blocking line of sight. I'm not sure when this would happen, and clearly it depends on the particulates, water droplets, etc, suspended in air. What we can say is that this effect would normally come into play at a far greater distance than the horizon at sea level.

Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #10 on: April 24, 2018, 03:30:45 PM »
There's also an issue with the atmosphere eventually blocking line of sight. I'm not sure when this would happen, and clearly it depends on the particulates, water droplets, etc, suspended in air. What we can say is that this effect would normally come into play at a far greater distance than the horizon at sea level.

I seen this just a couple weeks ago. The particulates of water filled the air in a solid form of matter called 'snow', and blocked the line of sight well before the distance of the horizon in something we up north call a 'blizzard'. :P

I took special note, that during this snow storm, there WAS NOT a horizon at all, a clear delimitation between the land and sky did not exist. Objects in the distance (apart from getting smaller) became hazier as they were obscured by snow until the furthest limit of visibility was nothing but the blanketing white wall of falling snow. I have personally seen this exact same thing happen in a fog, smoke and during a sandstorm. I've seen smog on TV and it looks the same. Sometimes, when I look up the clouds block my line of sight to any star in the sky (during both the day or night).

I've seen atmospheric effects obscure the horizon, but I've never seen them make a horizon.

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Offline AATW

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Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #11 on: April 24, 2018, 03:42:43 PM »
One of the strangest claims of FE...what I'll charitably call "theory" is this idea that perspective causes sunsets.
The way we see things is simply that if there is clear line of sight between us and the object, we can see it.
There would be nothing stopping you seeing the sun at all times in the flat earth model unless something blocked your vision to it, but the something would either have to be very tall or very close. Waves out at sea doesn't cut it. In this diagram I've shown how a wave taller than your eye line could block out more of a distant building than your height:



but if you're up a hill looking out to sea there is no way that a wave could be higher than your eye line so it would be more like this:



The wave hides less of the building than its own height if your eye level is above the wave height. So the idea that a sun THREE THOUSAND miles above the surface of a flat earth could be hidden behind waves is crazy. Long shadows at sunset prove that the sun is PHYSICALLY intersecting the horizon. I've asked Tom, and I've seen others ask him, to draw a simple diagram showing how the photons could be coming from a sun 3,000 miles high and 6,000 miles away and be coming at me horizontally or even upwards, casting upwards shadows as it does sometimes in the right landscape. He has never done so.
Tom: "Claiming incredulity is a pretty bad argument. Calling it "insane" or "ridiculous" is not a good argument at all."

TFES Wiki Occam's Razor page, by Tom: "What's the simplest explanation; that NASA has successfully designed and invented never before seen rocket technologies from scratch which can accelerate 100 tons of matter to an escape velocity of 7 miles per second"

Offline Westprog

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Re: Sunset. Please explain the pictures.
« Reply #12 on: April 25, 2018, 09:32:11 PM »
One of the strangest claims of FE...what I'll charitably call "theory" is this idea that perspective causes sunsets.
The way we see things is simply that if there is clear line of sight between us and the object, we can see it.
There would be nothing stopping you seeing the sun at all times in the flat earth model unless something blocked your vision to it, but the something would either have to be very tall or very close. Waves out at sea doesn't cut it. In this diagram I've shown how a wave taller than your eye line could block out more of a distant building than your height:



but if you're up a hill looking out to sea there is no way that a wave could be higher than your eye line so it would be more like this:



The wave hides less of the building than its own height if your eye level is above the wave height. So the idea that a sun THREE THOUSAND miles above the surface of a flat earth could be hidden behind waves is crazy. Long shadows at sunset prove that the sun is PHYSICALLY intersecting the horizon. I've asked Tom, and I've seen others ask him, to draw a simple diagram showing how the photons could be coming from a sun 3,000 miles high and 6,000 miles away and be coming at me horizontally or even upwards, casting upwards shadows as it does sometimes in the right landscape. He has never done so.

That's the real killer about "celestial perspective". We can explain pretty much everything we see using side-on diagrams tracing the path of rays of light from the object to the observer. That includes perspective, refraction, magnification and obstruction. It's perfectly possible to derive our normal experience of perspective using side on diagrams tracing light rays. It's not possible to draw a diagram that shows how light from a Sun supposedly 3000 miles up is suddenly blocked.