3 ms·

I think the curvature of the earth on those photos is exaggerated and camera artifacts. If you extrapolate, the earth would be much smaller in these photos.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
The article takes a lot of creative liberties to make this article, looks like.
dylan604 3y ago
I launched a helium balloon to ~90000' with a couple of GoPros. The footage looks similar.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  I'm no flat earth idiot but I can understand why they find such footage unconvincing. Find some gopro videos of tennis players, take a few stills from their videos and try tracing the tennis court lines with a line tool in an image editor. Straight lines on tennis courts turn into curved lines in gopro footage.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    If you're not going to take the time to learn and understand the physics of lenses while attempting to use images from those lenses as proof of a controversial claim, then buckle up buttercup, as the condescending criticism is going to be fierce. Sheer mockery and laughter will be well deserved.
enriquto 3y ago
> If you extrapolate, the earth would be much smaller in these photos. At that height, the horizon would appear nearly as a perfect straight line. With a pinhole camera, it would be projected as a straight line in the image plane. Thus, the curvature here has to do with the wide-angle geometry of the lens. If the camera was pointing higher, you would see the horizon curved in the other direction (which would look even cooler!).
mrandish 3y ago
The curvature does look sort of uncanny but then again, we don't often see photos from this vantage point. While some of these are wide angle photos which can have lens distortion, photo processing tools also have lens correction options to remove such distorions. Looking at the photos with the aircraft's wings visible, it doesn't appear as though there's much lens distortion remaining. One of the coolest aspects of the photos to me is the way you can see terrain in a fairly typical aircraft view underneath and still see the curvature of the horizon toward the edges. Since it's on a photography-centric site, I was a little disappointed there was no discussion of the camera gear or lens selection. I was also hoping to see camera EXIF metadata alongside the images which would typically reflect lens type, focal length, shutter speed, aperture, etc.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

The article takes a lot of creative liberties to make this article, looks like.

dylan604 3y ago

I launched a helium balloon to ~90000' with a couple of GoPros. The footage looks similar.

mcpackieh 3y ago
I'm no flat earth idiot but I can understand why they find such footage unconvincing. Find some gopro videos of tennis players, take a few stills from their videos and try tracing the tennis court lines with a line tool in an image editor. Straight lines on tennis courts turn into curved lines in gopro footage.
- dylan604 3y ago
  If you're not going to take the time to learn and understand the physics of lenses while attempting to use images from those lenses as proof of a controversial claim, then buckle up buttercup, as the condescending criticism is going to be fierce. Sheer mockery and laughter will be well deserved.

enriquto 3y ago

> If you extrapolate, the earth would be much smaller in these photos. At that height, the horizon would appear nearly as a perfect straight line. With a pinhole camera, it would be projected as a straight line in the image plane. Thus, the curvature here has to do with the wide-angle geometry of the lens. If the camera was pointing higher, you would see the horizon curved in the other direction (which would look even cooler!).

mrandish 3y ago

The curvature does look sort of uncanny but then again, we don't often see photos from this vantage point. While some of these are wide angle photos which can have lens distortion, photo processing tools also have lens correction options to remove such distorions. Looking at the photos with the aircraft's wings visible, it doesn't appear as though there's much lens distortion remaining. One of the coolest aspects of the photos to me is the way you can see terrain in a fairly typical aircraft view underneath and still see the curvature of the horizon toward the edges. Since it's on a photography-centric site, I was a little disappointed there was no discussion of the camera gear or lens selection. I was also hoping to see camera EXIF metadata alongside the images which would typically reflect lens type, focal length, shutter speed, aperture, etc.