scroll down to the second red-bolded section if you don't want to snooze through the boring details and just want to see the photos.(you won't hurt my feelings. such additional documentation is a necessary accompaniment to any serious experiment, but even i probably wouldn't want to read it unless it challenged my beliefs. plus i take a few gratuitous and not strictly necessary p0wnage jabs at bishop one last time, as a secondary bonus gift.)
it has become clear that bishop is a coward and will never post his "proof" of a flat earth. [you know, where he hides in the bushes with a telescope near the beach, and watches children running in and out of the water from 33 miles away on a clear chilly day.]
for something like a month, i have tried to arrange every kind of leverage imaginable to get him to post his proof. i have appealed to his sense of pride, his sense of anger, his sense of riteousness, you name it. nothing worked. which is perplexing: i told him i would welcome his visual evidence with open arms, and so have many others. he himself is a
big fan of photographic evidence.
photos of unknown internet provenance, and photos from verifiable *first-hand* provenance are two entirely different things.
anyway, i told bishop that as soon as he just *committed* to posting his evidence, i would post my evidence which disconfirms his fe assertions, and confirms the re reality. why would he not jump at that? surely he can obtain his fe evidence very easily. [he claims to have conducted the experiment many times, and the adapter for his camera and scope costs less than $40.] furthermore, surely i cannot obtain my re evidence at all, because it supposedly doesn't exist! he would emerge victorious, and i would look like a chump. [or have to come up with an endless series of excuses to avoid being so.]
well, it's time to stop beating a dead horse, he's not going to pony up, and just post my evidence anyway. and so as it turns out, bishop is the chump [troll] coming up with an endless series of excuses. i think it's pretty obvious that he
knows his evidence is just made-up and unattainable, and he was hoping to stall me with diversions of new and unrelated arguments, so i would not post mine.
so here is my photographic evidence. this has taken me well over 40 hours to photograph (multiple locations and 7.75 gb of photos), notate, organize, upload, and document - mostly over a long thanksgiving vacation. i must be crazy and i truly realize i need to leave this time sinkhole for good. (and i'm going to. i'll stick around long enough to answer questions and any required defense of methods and conclusions about this topic.)
- round earth by focal length. see if more zoom "restores" things "sunken" below the horizon or not.
- round earth by elevation. see if viewing the same things from successively higher elevations "restores" them from their "sunken" state.
- everything else. other photos of interest, such as a beach from 10 miles away and much higher elevation, at very high zoom and high megapixel. (remember, bishop claimed that at 33 miles, he could discern children vs. teenagers, and even frisbees.)
flikr doesn't have the best navigation, but i recommend navigating within each "set" that these links jump to (which are ordered by purposeful filename), rather than as a jumbled, unorganized whole. within each set they are ordered by increasing zoom, or elevation - rather than chronologically. also, this is a free flikr album, so the resolution is limited, and i only have so much bandwith available for upload. the pics are much, much higher res than what you see. if you'd like to see a 1:1 sample of a particular shot, let me know which one, and which portion, and i'll crop it out of my original (so flikr doesn't downsample it and also so i don't burn my monthly upload allotment) and upload it. if you have an ftp server you'd like to donate, i'll be happy to upload the full-size originals. it just might take a few days over my connection.
you can view the exif data for all pics. in addition, the images are named with a combination of date/time/shot sequence.
the individual images are well documented, some with narrative. all shot locations are exhaustively documented, including many google earth screenshots with precise lat/long locations and approx elevation, all included.
due to the nature of how google earth represents elevation, it is very inaccurate in wide views, and modestly accurate at more zoomed views. my typical representation is about +/- 10 ft. closer to the shore, my own personal estimations were more accurate so i used them instead. of course my garmin gps with built-in barometer was no more accurate than google earth, and gps is also not terribly accurate with elevation (hence the built-in supplemental barometer).
the results of this effort are very clear: ships and islands are clearly not "restored" with magnification even with modern technology. they are still very much "sunken". however, moving to higher elevation [fairly low-tech] very clearly "restores" them to un- or less- "sunken" states. furthermore, this proves conclusively that bishop is a liar, and demonstrates his cowardice, although this is not about bishop. it's about which explains documented and repeatable observation of verifiable provenance better: the fe hypothesis, or re theory. i think it's clear.miscellaneous notes on optics, zoom, and useful resolution
the most usable zoom i have for photos is a substantial 400mm lens, which after dslr cropping factor, is equivalent to 640mm on a 35mm camera. since i used two cameras with vastly different cropping factors, i used their 35mm equivalents in the filenames and descriptions, to equalize the descriptive measurements.
my zoom lens is more powerful, refined, and precise than the refractor telescopes of rowbotham's day. i also have an optical lens doubler, for effectively 1,280mm. but while the doubler is great for relatively nearby nature photography, it is generally practically useless for long-distance shots. that's because even on the clearest day in the most remote desert, atmospheric haze and turbulence make it irrelevant. you can't see any better, in fact the image is always worse and it's hard to tell what you're even looking at. it certainly doesn't help "restore" sunken bridges and islands, that's for sure.
furthermore, in carefully controlled tests i have conducted a while back, shots at 640mm and then "doubled" through post-procesing cropping and up-sampling, are no worse at resolving detail of distant objects (even just 8 miles or more depending on the day), than the same lens optically doubled to 1280mm.
also, an optically doubled lens is much harder to control since the light-gathering ability is cut by more than half, and on top of that the maximum aperture size is much smaller [larger f-stop number], requiring slow shutter speeds [with a big lens highly susceptible to wind vibration even on expensive tripod] and/or noisy and obscuring high iso.
all of which brings me to this: even the images you see on flikr can be zoomed in much, much farther, revealing more significantly more detail and actual, real zoom - up to 1:1 image pixel per screen pixel. however, doing so doesn't reveal more detail for the extreme far shots, say of the farallon islands, or the bay bridge, due to atmospheric haze and turbulence. and it certainly does not make them less sunken (trust me, i tried it). but like i said, i'm happy to crop and upload 1:1 images if anyone wants to see the effect for themselves.
i also have a set of fairly expensive military-grade stabilized binoculars, which are about as powerful as my zoom lens+optical doubler, but with more light-gathering ability. and comparable to bishop's telescope. and on my honor (for whatever that's worth for someone saying that on the internet), it did nothing to restore ships, islands, or bridges. in fact, zooming into the original high-megapixel pictures - approaching and reaching 1:1 image/screen pixels - provides the same if not *significanly more* real, usable resolution than even stabilized binoculars, thanks to a fixed field of view and the resolution of the eye with binoculars, and the ability with zoomed in photos to sit there for a long time and mull over them, in comfort without the chilly wind drying the sweat you worked up hiking around.edit: fixed first flikr set link.