More damning proof of earth's roundness:
While a missing shoreline in my pre-launch photo was compelling evidence, I wanted something more quantitative, so I set about measuring where the hidden bottom of the launch pad should be in the photo. Since the pad was about 12 miles away in the photo, the effect of the earth's curvature should be even more obvious. Of course this begs the question, how can someone figure out where the bottom of the pad should be when you can't see it in the photo? Well, we know how high the pad is and we know the size of the shuttle. I started by measuring a later photo when the shuttle had just cleared the launch tower and found that the SRB was 953 pixels long at the original rez. Since we know that the SRBs are 149.16 ft long, that corresponds to 6.39 pixels per foot. The total height of the launch pad from the top of the lightning mast to ground level is 389 feet. That corresponds to 2485 pixels. I drew a line exactly that long at the original rez from the top of the mast straight down. I then drew an identical line starting at exactly the same height but offset to the side so that it would be directly over the river in the picture. Sure enough, the line dips well below the top of the water. This cannot be explained by "perspective effects"
And here's the image of the shuttle clearing the tower used to establish scale:
All measurements were made at the original resolution before being resized for the web.