[Bobby Shafto]

I posted this on a thread in Angry Ranting, but I think it merits posting in the Flat Earth Investigation forum since it presents an observation worthy of flat earth analysis/explanation.

I captured this video a few days ago when coastal surface visibility was extraordinarily clear. This was with a telescope.



This was shot from an elevation of 25 feet in La Jolla.

The land sloping "into" the ocean horizon at the start of the clip is part of the San Onofre coastal range and is normally the furthest terrestrial sighting up the coast I've been able to make.  But on this day, little peaks were showing up further to the west/northwest, including this interesting silhouette seen at the 25 second mark of the video:



Examining GoogleEarth, I figured what I had been seeing was the top of hill near San Clemente, 44.34 miles away and around 850 high with some antennas adding to the profile.




A few days later, I took the telescope up to the summit of La Jolla's Mt. Soledad and from 790' this is what I could see:



The sinking ship explanation doesn't work since it's not an issue of resolution.



According to this flat earth model, no part of that hill in San Clemente should be hidden given the focal length of the telescope used:

[Tom Bishop]

I appreciate your observations, Bobby. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

According to RET, at 44.34 miles, standing at a height of 25 feet, we find that none of that hill should be visible:

https://dizzib.github.io/earth/curve-calc/



If we bring up the idea of curving light rays, then the discussion becomes more about how much the light is curving. We are now arguing about a mirage. "A mirage did it," in my opinion, is not a strong argument to put forward or a conclusive thing we can discuss.

Per the argument that this is not reflective of a Flat Earth, in Earth Not a Globe Rowbotham documents that these water convexity experiments are often variable; sometimes objects are obscured and sometimes they are revealed. Rowbotham says that on the seas in particular, does the sinking effect occur.

Looking into the distance on the seas is unreliable, by all accounts, yet this effect was the first and primary piece of evidence for a globe earth by the ancients.

If the ships are sinking by the curvature of the earth, why must we also imagine that there is a mirage there to make up any difference to salvage the curvature concept? This is not a strong argument; as we can equally imagine that the mirage is the full cause of the event.

[Bobby Shafto]

I appreciate your observations, Bobby. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

According to RET, at 44.34 miles, standing at a height of 25 feet, we find that none of that hill should be visible:

Thanks.

But RET includes atmospheric refraction:



This is not a pass/fail test, is it? We went through this with the Turning Torso tower. It's not enough for flat earth to say that something shouldn't be visible using an earth curve calculator. Failing a no-atmosphere calculation or one applying standard atmospheric refraction doesn't leave the earth flat if you can't explain why we can't see the whole object. Seeing the tip of something that "shouldn't be visible on a globe" doesn't mean the earth is flat.

But, if you're going to assess "RET," do it right and include the effect that an atmosphere has. We don't live on the moon. We have an atmosphere and it must be considered. Always.  And I know how to assess it in "RET." Not only do we not have a FET calculator but we have no way to apply the effects of the air.

[Tom Bishop]

Looking further at your images, it appears that the top of the hill is detailed and appears to be a solid body. I find it to be curious that a mirage projected into the air can maintain such solid detail and regularity.

Take a look at this image that is projected into the air via superior mirage. The details of the ship are off. It is see-through in parts and and indistinct:



Most mirages projected into the air produce a blurry mess:



It is curious how this type of mirage, as we have seen here, the twisting tower thread, and the JTolan mountain thread, should always be projected into the air so perfectly.

Further, we do see refraction effects at the bottom of the hill, but none on the top. Could this provide a clue on what is happening?

[Bobby Shafto]

Yeah. The clue is that inferior mirage is masking a thin band where line of sight is tangent to a convex surface. There is no Fata Morgana or superior mirage in evidence here.

So, this is explicable by curvature on an earth with standard atmospheric refraction.

What I'm asking is how is this explicable on a flat earth?


Edit:
Take note that in a globe earth model, inferior mirage isn't raising anything into view. Inferior mirage produces an inverted image below the actual image. The "water" in the desert or on a tarmac effect is just an inverted image of sky.

Here's the 25' view with mirage line drawn in.



The middle white line is the upper "fold" line of the inferior mirage. Below that and above what appears to be a water horizon is the inverted image of the same band above it, only inverted.

If the mirage is gone, the visible objective above the white lines doesn't change. The absence of mirage will only change what is seen between the middle white line and the lower white line.

That's globe model, anyway. I don't have any idea how to explain that in a FET model. I don't even know why that mirage would exist on a flat surface. If the earth was flat, the mirage might mask the beach at San Onofre, but not the entire 800' of land rise.

[Tom Bishop]

If there are formulas for "standard refraction," which depicts the most common refraction events under the assumption of a Round Earth, then it stands to reason that these formulas can also be reverse engineered to tell us the common refraction events under a Flat Earth. I will give it some thought.

[Bobby Shafto]

If there are formulas for "standard refraction," which depicts the most common refraction events under the assumption of a Round Earth...

What do you mean by "most common refraction events?"

Edit: Re-reading your earlier reply...

Looking further at your images, it appears that the top of the hill is detailed and appears to be a solid body. I find it to be curious that a mirage projected into the air can maintain such solid detail and regularity.

I think you think when "atmospheric refraction" is used to explain why something can be seen on a globe earth that should be hidden sans atmosphere, that means "mirage."

Am I right? Is that what you mean by "common refraction events?" Phenomena like mirages in the videos you posted?

[stack]

In order to have 0' hidden in the RE view, revealing the remaining 800' that can't be seen, the refraction value I found would be 0.975681.

So for the FE view to have 800' hidden in the image would the FE refraction value have to be -0.975681?

[Bobby Shafto]

In order to have 0' hidden in the RE view, revealing the remaining 800' that can't be seen, the refraction value I found would be 0.975681.

So for the FE view to have 800' hidden in the image would the FE refraction value have to be -0.975681?

Re-reading this a day later, I didn't articulate what I was trying to say very well.  I'll rework it later.

I've been puzzling over this and I was initially going to say no. The refraction coefficient is based on earth having a radius, and the coefficient is the ratio of radius of any curving of light to the curve of earth's radius. I don't think that figure has meaning in a flat earth context.

However; you could come up with a scale/index using the straightness of a flat earth as a basis for a curvature ratio between a no-curve earth and curving light in an atmolayer, and then correlate that to the atmospheric refraction value, I suppose.  In that way, there'd be some atmolayer/flat earth refraction value that would equate to a negative value in the round earth context that would describe light refracting away from the flat earth and causing objects to appear to be hidden by the illusion of curvature.

But you can't really use the atmosphere-centric k coefficient directly since that's assuming an earth with a radius. Using the same ratio coefficient for a flat earth means the numerator is infinite.

There's probably a way to do it, but it's not coming to me. Maybe Tom will figure something out. But I do agree that whatever the factor used, it should correlate such that light bending in a concave path, away from a flat earth surface will have the similar visual effect of causing "sinking ships."  But while we can understand why light would typically be refracted toward the curved surface by an atmosphere, what would cause a standard atmolayer to refract light upward away from a flat surface? You can come up with a relational factor/coefficient, but without an explanation why, it's just numbers.

[Bobby Shafto]

Another thing about this observation: the viewing elevation on Mount Soledad was 790'. One can get to a height of 815' with a tripod.

That hill/ridge in San Clemente is 850-900'. 

If "eye level" is 790-815', then that distant hilltop should not dip below eye level if the earth is flat. Maybe atmolayer conditions can cause it to appear to fluctuate, like in the Skunk Bay time lapse video, but the line of sight being ~800' above the surface should limit that.

But if the earth's surface is convex, then that far hill should consistently appear below the level line as viewed from Mt Soledad, even though it is slightly higher in elevation.

We have low clouds and fog limiting visibility today. Tomorrow is forecast to dry out and potential Santa Ana wind conditions could blow out the marine haze and maybe leave visibility good enough for a trip back to the La Jolla summit. If so, I'll try to perform a level observation and see whether that distant point does dip or stays at eye level.

[Bobby Shafto]

Another thing about this observation: the viewing elevation on Mount Soledad was 790'. One can get to a height of 815' with a tripod.

That hill/ridge in San Clemente is 850-900'. 

If "eye level" is 790-815', then that distant hilltop should not dip below eye level if the earth is flat. Maybe atmolayer conditions can cause it to appear to fluctuate, like in the Skunk Bay time lapse video, but the line of sight being ~800' above the surface should limit that.

But if the earth's surface is convex, then that far hill should consistently appear below the level line as viewed from Mt Soledad, even though it is slightly higher in elevation.

We have low clouds and fog limiting visibility today. Tomorrow is forecast to dry out and potential Santa Ana wind conditions could blow out the marine haze and maybe leave visibility good enough for a trip back to the La Jolla summit. If so, I'll try to perform a level observation and see whether that distant point does dip or stays at eye level.

Weather is not cooperating. Heavy surface haze that is limiting visibility to less than 10 miles.  And today is the last chance I'll get until after Christmas. Will just have to wait a couple more weeks for resolution to the question "does it dip or not?"

[AATW]

Bobby, if I may.

I think you're getting yourself into a world of "how do you know the distant peak is really below the level of the first", "how do you know that the camera is level" and so on. It's like the horizon dip experiments, you showed the result very clearly but there was still a load of counter-argument like this. What would be ideal is something like:



So if your camera was on the peak at the far left and that's at the same height as two peaks which are reasonably close together and there's a distant peak which is also the same height then on a flat earth if you're looking across the two close peaks so they are level then the distant one should also appear aligned with the top of the the two close peaks. On a globe earth the distant peak would be round the curve of the earth a bit and would appear below that level.

This is hard to achieve but it is closed to what Tom was proposing some time back as an experiment.

[Bobby Shafto]

That would be nice, but I can only use what's "outside my window."

Lacking that, standing on one summit, finding level with a sighting tool like the water level, and then extending that level sight line to another distant peak -- the water level really serves the role of those 2nd and 3rd peaks in your graphic.

Someone committed to a preconceived result will always find reason to reject contrary evidence.

And who's to say the result will be contrary? I haven't even performed the observation yet. I'm just planning and waiting for suitable conditions.

Fortunately, my objective is not to convert flat earthers. I just enjoy the investigation and dialogue about it.