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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Do passenger airplane windows distort camera photos?
« on: August 27, 2017, 10:26:39 PM »Lots of people post photos taken out of passenger airliner windows that claim to show horizon curvature.
FE'ers always reply by saying that the window of the plane causes distortion that makes it look like that.
Then, I thought a bit about the shape of the windows. They don't bulge outwards or dimple inwards compared to the skin of the airplane because that would add horrible amounts of drag. They match the curvature of the skink of the plane - which is cylindrical over most of the (cattle-class) seats that I can afford.
That means that the two layers of plastic that make up the window are such that the inner layer is dead flat - but the outer layer is a section of a cylinder. The plastic is of uniform thickness in both cases.
So the lensing effect of the window ought to preserve horizontal lines as horizontal - which means that they can't possibly bend the horizon line into a curve when the plane is flying straight-and-level.
But then, thinking harder on the problem - I realize that a curved sheet of plastic would be like a convex lens followed by a concave lens...and being almost exactly the same radius of curvature, they would cancel each other out.
Now I'm suspecting that our FE friends are talking bullshit here. (No! Surely not!)
So in the interests of doing an experiment, when I recently took a flight on a brand new 787 airplane, I thought I should test this idea.
I pressed my cellphone flat against the inner window and snapped photos of the wing of the airplane. The aileron (I think that's what it is) that's in my view is dead straight in diagrams of the airplane I found online...and in my photos, that same line is straight too.
Hmmm - so NO DISTORTION!
Oh - oh! Could it possibly be that the FE'ers are talking nonsense here?
Surely not?
I'm rather certain that this whole FE excuse of the window glass distorting the straight horizon to make it LOOK curved may well be a bunch of hogwash.
If I'm correct - then we can find DIRECT proof of the curvature of the horizon...and I *KNOW* that FE'ers trust direct experimental evidence.
I'm flying back tomorrow - and I'll try to get more pictures. On the outbound flight, it was too cloudy to get a clear picture of the horizon...maybe I'll get lucky coming back. It's the exact same airplane both ways...so that's good.
I'll post results in a couple of days when I have a moment to spare.
A simple way to test this is to take pictures at all point of the flight and at different altitudes. If the window is curved enough to produce a curve on the horizon, then we will notice curves in other places where there ought not be a curve through the same window.