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Offline Bobby Shafto

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Sunset Ship Sighting
« on: November 16, 2018, 05:12:28 PM »
I've been seeing this ship operating off the coast for a few days now. I captured its profile against the backdrop of a sky illuminated by sunset:



It's an unusual looking surface combatant: one of the newer Zumwalt-class of destroyers. In fact, it's the only one currently in operation. It has to be the USS Zumwalt, DDG-1000, homeported in San Diego.

But the point here is flat/globe, and from this diagram, I estimate 10m, or about 30', appears to be hidden by something. I, of course, believe it to be a horizon caused by a globe earth's curvature.



This is where MarineTraffic reported the ship's location at the 4PM PST time of the video (0000 UTC)



I was watching and shooting from the overlook at Ellen Browning Scripps Park in La Jolla, here. GoogleEarth tells me that spot has an elevation of 25'. I would have guessed higher.

Plugging in the coordinates for the Zumwalt at 1600 yesterday afternoon and my viewing location, I get 13 miles.



And plugging that 13 miles and my 25' height into the Metabunk earth curve calculator gets 31.5' hidden without refraction and 23.31' hidden with standard refraction.



Given the margins of estimating errors, isn't this pretty good correlation to globe earth model predictions?

I was very much intrigued by the success of this video, claiming to show no earth curvature over a similar span. I haven't worked out a globe earth explanation for that other than MAYBE atmospheric surface-level ducting by a strong inversion layer. But I can't prove that.

However, this "sunken ship" observation, in my opinion, affirms the earth curvature and I haven't seen a flat earth explanation other than one akin to my ducting response to the Monterey Bay video. Is there one?

Addtional context, this video was shot through a telescope, which didn't change the amount of hull I could or couldn't see compared to my camera zoom alone. Improved resolution/magnification has no effect.


Edit: similar to this prior topic
https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=10077.0
« Last Edit: November 17, 2018, 06:24:25 PM by Bobby Shafto »

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Offline stack

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #1 on: November 16, 2018, 06:25:26 PM »
By no means laser accurate. But here's what a spec of the destroyer looks like superimposed over the image. From looking at a bunch of photos, the water line is generally at the bottom of the black strip on the hull.


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Offline Tom Bishop

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #2 on: November 16, 2018, 06:32:37 PM »
I say it's another one of the squished inferior mirage effects we've been talking about.


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Offline RonJ

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #3 on: November 16, 2018, 07:05:43 PM »
I've seen a ship like that when I was on a military ship going back into Norfolk Naval Yard several yeas ago.  Your video was typical of what you would see when a ship is starting to go over the curvature of the earth.  Don't believe all the nonsense you hear about mirage and other stuff like that.  That's from a landlubber.  I used to see the effects of curvature all day, every day when I was working on cargo ships.  Sometimes we would be in a huge anchorage off the coast of China waiting to go into Shanghai.  It wouldn't be unusual to see vessels at anchor half hidden by curvature.  They were anchored because their beacon was showing that and they had zero relative speed on our radars when we were anchored as well. You could take a look at the same ship the next day and see the same thing. 
You can lead flat earthers to the curve but you can't make them think!

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #4 on: November 16, 2018, 07:06:35 PM »
I say it's another one of the squished inferior mirage effects we've been talking about.

I thought refraction was RE's magic wand, not FE's?

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Offline Bobby Shafto

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #5 on: November 16, 2018, 07:20:39 PM »
I say it's another one of the squished inferior mirage effects we've been talking about.
That would be a 10:1 squish ratio.



Also, mirage isn't a squishing phenomenon. The squishing is the result of different refractive gradients in incident angle/elevation between the top of an object and it's bottom, which can accompany inferior miraging, but oftentimes there's a stretching (towering) instead of squishing (stooping).  Or a fluctuation between the two.

Yesterday morning, there was mirage looking north along the coastline, but there was also significant towering that, to the naked eye, made some of the coastal sandstone bluffs in the distance look like high rise buildings had been erected overnight. The Coronado Islands I sometimes use as the subject of my horizon-level investigations will, at times, seem to be standing up tall as if their foundations were lifted. And that's without a hint of mirage in sight. 

There is inferior mirage here to be sure. I thought the elements of the flight deck poking up toward the end of the video revealed that well, but you saw it at the bow, which is what give is a more blunt drop off than the angled taper that it actually is.

But what's missing in your compression theory is an explanation for how that would work on a flat earth.

If can explain how an inversion layer at the surface can cause light to be ducted and follow the curve of the earth for a bit and make something appear that wouldn't otherwise appear on a curved earth without the ducting. I suspect -- not claim, just hypothesize -- that's why we see the mirrored sun flash in that Monterey Bay video. I'm reaching for that as an explanation, yes. But it's optically explicable and not just a "magic wand" as you say.

"Magic wand is claiming "compression" based on the presence of an inferior mirage. Where's the reasoning behind that other than a "hand wave?"  What's the mechanism that could cause that? Is it just coincidental that the curvature calculator is nearly spot on for what these distances and elevations on a globe predict? I can pop down to the beach from these cliffside observation points and the "sunken ship" effect follows accordingly? How does that work with "compression?"

I've entertained the compression explanation even though I don't agree. But I feel like I keep asking for an explanation of how that atmo-planar refractive phenomenon works on a flat earth while you disparage my invoking of refractive impact of an atmosphere on a globe earth.

You say we "mumble" stuff about refraction to salvage a globe earth even though we try to explain the whys and hows.
How is invoking "compression" not, itself, mumbling, especially if there's no rationale offered than correlation with mirage?


Here's one for you, Tom:
What's behind that thin band of mirage? If you could magic wand it away, would you...
(a) see the apparent horizon rise to where the mirage's mirrored fold is in the picture?
(b) see more ship and the horizon line would stay where it appears to be?
(c) see all of the ship and the horizon line would drop to the ship's waterline?

It seems to me, if "compression" is the flat earth explanation, then mirage isn't causing the horizon to "dip" but to rise. Or, is there another possibility?

(d) see the horizon rise to the mirage fold, but the whole ship would appear to elevate such that we would see its waterline at the horizon?
« Last Edit: November 16, 2018, 07:36:00 PM by Bobby Shafto »

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Offline Bobby Shafto

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #6 on: November 16, 2018, 08:00:15 PM »
I see that ship is still maneuvering about off the coast. It's currently about 25 miles from some of my favorite Point Loma viewing spots.

If I telescopically observe it from 360' and from 100', how much will that difference in angle have on the "sinking ship" assuming the ocean's surface is a plane and not convex?

I could run out right now and bring back those observations. nI can provide imagery of the Coronado Islands too, just to baseline what the refractive conditions are that might (most certainly will be) impacting optics.

The ship's moving, but last position was 32.7016 -117.6825.
I'll take photos from here and here


I know predictions are part of the zetetic method, but care to make one anyway?


Edit: the visibility is not sufficient. It’s pretty good locally, but the marine layer has returned and must be right around 20 miles. I can sight another Navy ship that’s about 12 miles out. But can’t see the Zumwalt, even from high point.

Later maybe.
« Last Edit: November 16, 2018, 08:45:17 PM by Bobby Shafto »

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Offline Tom Bishop

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #7 on: November 16, 2018, 09:25:18 PM »
Quote
"Magic wand is claiming "compression" based on the presence of an inferior mirage. Where's the reasoning behind that other than a "hand wave?"

Unlike the RE "refraction did it!" claims, the effect I am referencing is neither a magic wand or a hand wave. We have seen it happening.

09/07/12 Timelapse
On this day there was a mixture of sunken and visible effects

09/06/12 Timelapse
On this day the peninsula was sunken throughout most of the day

09/01/12 Timelapse
On this day the peninsula was visible throughout most of the day

A scene showing that the above videos are zoom views

At times over the course of a day, for long periods, the opposite peninsula is seen to be sunken:



At other times of the day, and for long periods, the opposite bay appears to be fully revealed:



We can see the inferior mirage decompressing from the shore in the following transition:



None of this is a hand wave or magic wand. It is clear and direct evidence of the reality of this effect.
« Last Edit: November 16, 2018, 11:00:25 PM by Tom Bishop »

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Offline Tom Bishop

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #8 on: November 16, 2018, 09:49:37 PM »
I was watching and shooting from the overlook at Ellen Browning Scripps Park in La Jolla, here. GoogleEarth tells me that spot has an elevation of 25'. I would have guessed higher.

Plugging in the coordinates for the Zumwalt at 1600 yesterday afternoon and my viewing location, I get 13 miles.



And plugging that 13 miles and my 25' height into the Metabunk earth curve calculator gets 31.5' hidden without refraction and 23.31' hidden with standard refraction.



Given the margins of estimating errors, isn't this pretty good correlation to globe earth model predictions?

While I have my suspicions about Marine Traffic accurately reporting the live coordinates of U.S. destroyers, I see what may be a mistake in this calculation. Was your camera resting on the ground?


Quote
Here's one for you, Tom:
What's behind that thin band of mirage? If you could magic wand it away, would you...
(a) see the apparent horizon rise to where the mirage's mirrored fold is in the picture?
(b) see more ship and the horizon line would stay where it appears to be?
(c) see all of the ship and the horizon line would drop to the ship's waterline?

It seems to me, if "compression" is the flat earth explanation, then mirage isn't causing the horizon to "dip" but to rise. Or, is there another possibility?

(d) see the horizon rise to the mirage fold, but the whole ship would appear to elevate such that we would see its waterline at the horizon?

If I could magic it away I would expect to see something similar to below:

Sunken:


Revealed:


These two images were cropped from the same pixel-for-pixel part of the screen. The horizon in front of the sunken body drops in the revealed version, meaning that the effect creates a higher horizon in front of the body than there is.
« Last Edit: November 16, 2018, 10:03:00 PM by Tom Bishop »

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #9 on: November 16, 2018, 10:20:23 PM »
Unlike the RE "refraction did it!" claims, the effect I am referencing is neither a magic wand or a hand wave. We have seen it happening.

So are you saying that in FET, all observations of the "Sinking Ship Effect" are due to the presence of an inferior mirage?

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Offline Bobby Shafto

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #10 on: November 16, 2018, 11:24:03 PM »
None of this is a hand wave or magic wand. It is clear and direct evidence of the reality of this effect.
But that doesn't look like sunken ship effect. That's distortion. And yes, it's well-known that it happens. But that Skunk Bay time lapse isn't showing a bottom-up sinking. Mirage? Check. Stooping? Check. Looming? Check.

But does it explain missing footage when there is none to little of that distortion occurring?

Those effects in the Skunk Bay video don't occur all the time. Much of the time, the air is stable. But still "sunken ship" effect occurs.

In fact, I can make it happen just by changing my elevation. I can focus my camera on the Coronado Islands from the tide pools at Point Loma and get a 10 minute time lapse, not see any of that Skunk Bay-like distortion and not be able to see the shoreline of those islands.  But 10 minutes after, I can be up at 360' and the Island's shorelines are visible and the horizon now is further in the distance.

No sudden influx of waves.
No sudden diminishing of distorting effects of the air.

Yet, anytime you are shown an image of something appearing to be cut-off bottom up, you refer to Skunk Bay. It's apples and oranges.

If you can explain the effects -- how what is seen in the Skunk Bay video is occurring -- that would be something. But you're not. You're seeing something that looks (to you) to be similar and deciding without further examination that that's the answer. If that's it, it fails to stand up to repeated observations. It's situational.

Sure, some things will look maybe a little like a ship going over a globe's horizon curve -- maybe like the Stranger disappearing into a desert mirage at the end of High Plains Drifter. But just looking like it doesn't mean it's an explanation.

You posted a video once that offered a really good possible explanation for the visual "sunken ship" effect on a flat earth. But the problem with that was that it required light to be refracted away from the earth's flat surface. But how does that happen? On a sphere (with an atmosphere), light is generally refracted toward the earth's convex surface. That's how refraction works on a globe. All the miraging and distorting effects are transient, depending on fluctuations of temperature gradient, moisture and pressure with elevation. I can't imagine how those varying conditions could produce a more or less consistent effect we're calling "sunken ship."

When I drive down the access road that leads from the entry gate at Cabrillo Point down to the facilities on the bluff by the lighthouse, I descend 300' in a couple of minutes. I can literally watch the Coronado Islands "sink" bottom up.  Up the road? They rise. Back down? They sink. And it looks nothing like the Skunk Bay video.

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Offline Bobby Shafto

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #11 on: November 16, 2018, 11:29:49 PM »
Oh, and this doesn't contribute to the discussion but it's a follow-up to me not being able to find the USS Zumwalt earlier. I noticed it had at some point come out of the haze. Here it is at 17 miles to the west, as seen from the 360' view point. Fully visible down to the water line, as would be expected on a globe earth...and a flat earth.



I toyed with going back down to 100' to compare, but I was already running late.

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Offline Bobby Shafto

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #12 on: November 17, 2018, 12:05:49 AM »
While I have my suspicions about Marine Traffic accurately reporting the live coordinates of U.S. destroyers, I see what may be a mistake in this calculation. Was your camera resting on the ground?
No. It was on a telescope mounted on a tripod. And I did not add the +4 feet to the 25 foot MSL ground height. That is a mistake.

Correcting for that and showing effect of a margin of error in distance.

« Last Edit: November 17, 2018, 12:14:32 AM by Bobby Shafto »

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Offline Bobby Shafto

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #13 on: November 17, 2018, 12:22:19 AM »
Here's one for you, Tom:
What's behind that thin band of mirage? If you could magic wand it away, would you...
(a) see the apparent horizon rise to where the mirage's mirrored fold is in the picture?
(b) see more ship and the horizon line would stay where it appears to be?
(c) see all of the ship and the horizon line would drop to the ship's waterline?

[snip]

(d) see the horizon rise to the mirage fold, but the whole ship would appear to elevate such that we would see its waterline at the horizon?

If I could magic it away I would expect to see something similar to below:

[images snipped]


These two images were cropped from the same pixel-for-pixel part of the screen. The horizon in front of the sunken body drops in the revealed version, meaning that the effect creates a higher horizon in front of the body than there is.

So, answer C.

Mirage make a horizon appear higher. Without mirage the horizon is lower.
And mirage hides at least some of the missing elements of an object, making it appear to sink; and if you remove the mirage, some of those missing elements are visible again, revealing the illusion.

Is that right?

Edit:
Here's the Skunk Bay frame capture you chose. The top image is what you called the 'revealed' view.

The next two are "sunken ship effect" candidates of that view. Can you identify the differences? One shows "compression" of Bush Point; and the other is a "sunken ship effect" view of the Point? Which is which?


I'd also like to point out...


We can see the inferior mirage decompressing from the shore in the following transition:




...the clip you choose is actually a superior mirage.

The clip starts with a stooped view.
It then sinks (drops) as a superior mirage forms over the sunken view.
The superior mirage then fades leaving the shoreline at a lower angle but less stooped.

"Sinking ship effect" is often accompanied with such distorting optics, but nothing there looks like a sinking ship effect. 
« Last Edit: November 18, 2018, 10:48:37 PM by Bobby Shafto »

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Offline Bobby Shafto

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #14 on: November 28, 2018, 06:38:25 PM »
Here's one for you, Tom:
What's behind that thin band of mirage? If you could magic wand it away, would you...
(a) see the apparent horizon rise to where the mirage's mirrored fold is in the picture?
(b) see more ship and the horizon line would stay where it appears to be?
(c) see all of the ship and the horizon line would drop to the ship's waterline?

[snip]

(d) see the horizon rise to the mirage fold, but the whole ship would appear to elevate such that we would see its waterline at the horizon?

If I could magic it away I would expect to see something similar to below:

[images snipped]


These two images were cropped from the same pixel-for-pixel part of the screen. The horizon in front of the sunken body drops in the revealed version, meaning that the effect creates a higher horizon in front of the body than there is.

So, answer C.

Mirage makes a horizon appear higher. Without mirage the horizon is lower.
And mirage hides at least some of the missing elements of an object, making it appear to sink; and if you remove the mirage, some of those missing elements are visible again, revealing the illusion.

Is that right?

I shall assume I got it right. C is your answer.

Take a look at this and let's see if this supports that answer:



I recorded this from a 25' perch at La Jolla Cove. This is a telescope view of Swami's (Seaside Cliff Beach) in Encinitas, 12.9 miles across the (lateral) curving San Diego County coastline. I want to eventually perform the same sort of experiment these Research Flat Earth folks did over the 13 mile span from Lovers' Point to Moss Landing there on Monterey Bay.

Going solo for now and not having a signaling partner positioned on the far beach, I've tried this out on several days, both morning, midday and around sunset. I've yet to see the beach. However, yesterday morning (11/27) I captured the above video and noticed something. 

GoogleEarth has a pretty good rendering of the bluff-side beach and the stairs that descend from the park above (~70-80') down to the high point of the beach, which then rakes down about another 10' to the waterline (which can vary from -1 to about +6 on normal tidal ranges).



Depending on the direction of the sunlight and the amount of haze, I can normally make out the stairs and the lifeguard shack at the last landing. It sits on pilings about 8' off the highest beach point, and it's roof is easily another 7-8' above that. I know I can see it from 25' high in La Jolla.

But it's missing from that video. Look closely at the video though. At the very start, you can see a surfer climbing the stairs and below is a mirror image. Hey! There's an inferior mirage at work. The fact that it seems the mirror fold of the reversed image is right where the stairs makes its turn fooled me.

Here is a screen capture with my annotation of the line where the upper edge of the mirage starts, below which is producing an inverted mirror effect:



Compare that with this hazier but clearer image taken just the previous afternoon as the sun was setting, and with no mirage:



There's the lifeguard tower and even the shower stall area to the left. I can't see the beach or the space underneath the lofted tower, but obviously the inferior mirage was obscuring the true shore details below the line I drew in approximating where the top of the mirage had been.

But here's the question. How did it affect the apparent horizon? 

There was 4-foot difference in tide between the time of the no-mirage image and the mirage image, with the high incoming tide occurring the morning the mirage image was taken. Also, there but a tiny swell the previous evening during low tide and no mirage, whereas a WNW swell was starting to hit yesterday morning during the higher tide. It's larger now (with beach warnings in effect), but at the time the set waves were 4-5' at most; but definitely different from the lazier knee-high "waves" of the previous day.

So mull those details and pics over and see if you think it supports or defies the C answer above. I'm still working it over so it's not like I'm trying to set a "trap." I have another example of the NRG smokestack 20 miles away with and without mirage that might be worth investigating too, but let me get your feedback on this first.

To me, I don't see the mirage affecting the horizon line. On a globe earth, there should be a horizon caused by curvature, and it should be 6-7 miles away from my 25' view point. And I would expect to be seeing about 20' (+/- maybe 5') being hidden by that horizon. So it makes sense to me, from a globe earth perspective, that I'm not seeing below the level of the lifeguard house decking. If someone were down by the water, shining a mirror to reflect the sun back toward me in La Jolla, I should not be able to see it. I don't see people walking or jogging along the sand. I can't see the many surfers flocking to that mock point/reef break once they step off the stairs.

The question, though, is that hidden effect due to optical "compression" or mirage? I've tried short stints of time lapse to see if it fluctuates like the Skunk Bay video, but I haven't captured that kind of dynamic phenomena. I have, though, seen inferior mirage; but instead of altering what I think the horizon is hiding, it only alters the details of what I could already see above the horizon.

My interpretation is that the mirage effect is occurring at a distance beyond the 6-7 miles of the globe earth calculated horizon. If the mirage was having it's effect in the foreground, and there was sky in the background vice land, then I would expect that the apparent horizon would seem to be lowered. But would it be responsible for hiding the far beach? I say no because here we can see it removed and the horizon line doesn't drop beyond a certain point.

(I'm not even sure that's water edge obstacle would even be considered a "horizon" in a flat earth model since it's so close and flat earth horizons are based on vanishing points and resolution. There is no horizon in the Skunk Bay video for either flat or globe earth models. That camera is set 70' high and Bush Point is only about 6.5 to 7 miles away.)
« Last Edit: November 28, 2018, 06:40:32 PM by Bobby Shafto »

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Offline Bobby Shafto

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #15 on: November 29, 2018, 03:43:31 PM »
Watched this Navy combatant turn west and head out toward the San Clemente Island training area yesterday.



I tried hard to imagine how the appearance of it going over a curved horizon was just an illusion. But I might just be too entrenched in my globe earth world view. I've seen this so many times, it looks exactly like what something disappearing beyond the horizon caused by a convex surface should look like.

"Should" doesn't mean it has to be, but it doesn't look like what the flat earth explanations have said are reasons for the "sinking ship" illusion.

It's not fading into an obscuring mist.
It's not disappearing to a vanishing point.
It's not being compressed into a thin line.
It's not being obscured by mirage.
It's not being hidden by ocean waves/swells.

Either something is causing light to bend upward and giving the appearance of convexity.
Or the earth's surface really is convex.

-----

I did this awhile ago as a concept for a video demo I'd hoped to make. But I'm not going to ever get around to it, so I'll just post this.  It shows how lens causing light to bend up and away from the surface can make things appear to disappear like the "sunken ship effect."






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Offline RonJ

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Re: Sunset Ship Sighting
« Reply #16 on: November 29, 2018, 04:25:14 PM »
What you are seeing is about what I would visually see on the bridge of a ship.  The additional confirmation would be the radar picture.  We had radars that would show the AIS data overlayed by the radar echo.  The AIS data had a much longer range than the radar echo itself.  You could readily see the echo fade steadily away as the ship went over the curvature of the earth and the AIS data would continue to show the actual position of the ship as it continued to open up the distance.  The opposite was true as well.  If we were in a busy sea lane you would often see the AIS data overlayed on the radar screen of an on coming ship so you knew something was coming your way.  The on coming ship would be invisible visually and by radar.  The AIS data transmits the ships position, course, and speed so we had all that data and it would be displayed on the radar at the correct position relative to our ship.  Slowly we would then start to see just tiny return echos overlaying the AIS mark on the radar screen. The lookout could then usually start to see just the tops of the mast of the on coming ship.  As our distance steady closed then the radar echos would become very strong and the lookout would see in his binoculars a nice view of the ship.  In busy areas of the ocean this procedure was done day in and day out. By using the tracking feature of the radar we could see the historical course of the oncoming ship and if it looked like that ship might need to cross our path ahead of us the mate would usually call the other ship on the VHF radio to make a deal for a passage maneuver.  We didn't want any collisions.  The passage of other ships over the horizon was an everyday thing that we saw under all kinds of different conditions so the earth's curvature is an obvious thing for me.
« Last Edit: November 29, 2018, 04:26:50 PM by RonJ »
You can lead flat earthers to the curve but you can't make them think!