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.)