clair002

I love doing these because I found an error in the ' Blue Marble ' Wikipedia entry, someone was careless with their timezone conversions and flagged this image as taken at 05:39 UTC which is 6 minutes after launch, clearly wrong.  Also why I always check facts against primary sources. Blue Marble Wikipedia error Here is our quarry: Image Credit: AS17-148-22727  [and Flickr ] The published version that was cleaned up from the scan: Here is what we know: Apollo 17 launched on 7th Dec 1972 at 12:33am EST (0533 UTC) [ Apollo By The Numbers ][ Apollo 17 ] The 'Blue Marble' frame (aka AS17-148-22727) was taken 5 hours 6 minutes later  (probably by Jack Schmitt). So that puts us at 5:39am EST (1039 UTC).  See the mix up? There is also an amazing site called  Apollo In Real-Time  where you can follow along the whole long, view the photos from around that time in the mission, listen to the mission control recordings, and so forth. So here we are 7th Dec 1...

I have some new toys to share in this installment of 'Yes, the Earth really is Curved even though you can see one distant mountain peak from another', so this should be fun! This time we're going to look at a view of two distant mountains from Pic de Finestrelles (2826m) in the Pyrénées , taken by Marc Bret of Beyond Horizons (see also the Flickr album ). Pic Gaspard (3880m) in the Massif des Écrins range at a distance of 443 km. Grand Ferrand (2758m) at a distance of 392.48 km. Our view is right around 42.414466°N, 2.132839°E at about 2826 meters elevation, looking right along the coast. Pic Gaspard/Grand Ferrand from Pic de Finestrelles in the Pyrénées, image by Marc Bret The EXIF metadata shows this image was taken by a Panasonic DMC-FZ72 with a focal length of 215mm -- given the 5.62 crop factor of the 1/2.3" sensor in this camera, this gives you a 35mm equivalent focal length of 1200mm giving a full frame view of 1.644° wide and 1.215° high. Since 1521 x 101...

A beautiful study in shades of blue of the ocean and open skies just floated across my twitter stream posted by  @mcnees , taken on an iPhone 6s. He was gracious enough to send me a link to the original for this blog (thanks!): It's so quiet and serene, it really is a gorgeous image... But my inner-scientist just had to check... A quick check on my phone using the smaller twitter image confirmed a few pixels of drop off on the right side, so I took the full resolution image and rotated it 0.2° counterclockwise to correct for the slight camera rotation and compressed the width to 202 pixels (1/20 of the original size)... Here is the result: That is about 5-7 pixels high in the full resolution, 4032 x 3024 pixel image. However, from this vantage point, let's say about 20 feet over the water, 4032 pixel wide image, ~ 57.724° Field of View I would expect only about one pixel of 'apparent horizon Sagitta' .  We would have to be about 1400 feet over the water to see 6 pixels...

This post comes via C.A.M. Gerlach.  The guest author is a degreed research meteorologist specializing in severe convective weather and societal impacts, currently affiliated with the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Flat Earth Claims: An Observational Perspective C.A.M. Gerlach, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Many a Flat Earth proponent has invited skeptics to neglect the copious volume of indirect evidence that our planet is a rotating oblate spheroid, and just 'think for yourself.' Very well; coming from someone who has, I too invite everyone to experience things and think for themselves. Let's consider the International Space Station, and forget the fact that I've personally spoken to the astronauts on it (must have been actors somehow simulating microgravity, who knows?), and just rely on measurements you and I can directly make. Look up when it is due to pass over your location, noting the elevation in the sky at which it appears and disappears and the time the passes between t...

Made this GIF from Sly Sparkane's video in case anyone finds it helpful: Here is the full video:

I've been meaning to tackle Dubay's '200 Proofs'  Gish Gallop for a while but it's rather long and repetitious and most of it is already covered on my Blog in more interesting ways.  But I thought it might be fun and useful to create a kind of taxonomy of Flat Earth failures from it, so that is my primary goal. It's also interesting to see that a lot of them are just copy & pasted from "Earth Not A Globe" and many others are from other sources -- I begin to doubt that Dubay came up with a single one of these himself. Here is the video version of Dubay's '200 proofs' (NOTE: Dubay got himself delete for hate speech so I'm now linking to a mirror [ original ]): Before I get started, when you see someone claiming 'Proof' you should immediately be wary because science doesn't deal in proofs.  Proof is done in a formal way in mathematics and there is a colloquial sense of 'proof' where the evidence supports the conclu...