First, let's review the Tom Bishop Canned Response™ on this issue:
Here we go:
The video feed will look like this: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-150-space-camera-mit-students-beat-nasa-on-beer-money-budget/
(Slight curvature at the edge of space occurs from the fact that the observer is looking down at a circle)
The same explanation for curvature is used for those high altitude balloons which amateurs put up. At great altitudes the observer is looking down at a circle.
Pictures like this from the edge of space are not faked or unexplainable in FET. At the edge of space the balloon is looking down at a circle, and thus would see some slight curvature to the horizon.
The proof is in the pudding. The earth is flat. The sun casts a circular area of light. Therefore from high altitudes you are looking down at a circle.
It's not possible to measure the size of the sun's spotlight in amateur edge-of-space photography.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-150-space-camera-mit-students-beat-nasa-on-beer-money-budget/
There is some shallow curvature at the edge of the atmosphere, but only because at such great heights the observer is looking down at a circle
You will see some slight curvature to the horizon because at such great heights you are looking down at a circle.
You will see a scene similar to those high altitude balloons which touch the edge of space.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/the-150-space-camera-mit-students-beat-nasa-on-beer-money-budget/
I just see a slight elliptical curve from high altitude balloons at the edge of the atmosphere. It seems as if we are looking down at a circle.
I've seen enough high altitude amateur balloon photographs to know that there is some slight curvature seen at the edge of space, enough to be ambiguous as to whether we are looking down at a globe or a disk.
See the MIT Space Camera balloon experiment, for example. Nope. No circle of darkness. It looks as if we're looking down at a circle of light.
The "circle of light" is said to be caused by the sun. Tom solves the obvious issue of pictures taken in the dark by simply denying that they exist. I kid you not:
But none of these amateurs are doing these experiments near nightfall, where the balloon can be lost in the darkness. All of the experiments are done during daylight hours so the balloon can be recovered.
First of all, this reasoning is completely absurd, as the balloons are fitted with GPS and the operators can, you know,
wait until the next morning to pick them up. But, worst of all, Tom actually made this deceptive claim
while he knew it was false:
That was a factual statement at the time I made that. To my knowledge no one did the balloon experiment at nightfall.
Tom Bishop caught in yet another lie. No, that was not factual to your knowledge at that time. You posted that on January 23rd. You had already posted in my thread, What causes the circle of darkness, on January 17th, in reply to a website dedicated to balloon experiments at nightfall. Nice try.
So anyway, here is the classic case in point which the TBCR™ fails to address:
(full size)Original source:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/liegelr/sets/72157624530196449/Altitude: 50,000 to 75,000 feet
Camera used: Canon PowerShot SD870 IS
EXIF details:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/liegelr/6233434076/meta/in/set-72157624530196449So then we have to fall back on the Auxiliary Canned Response: that the photos are misleading due to the lens distortion that most cameras exhibit. Why Tom Bishop didn't use this explanation on all the daytime photos, I don't know -- does the lens-distorting bogeyman only come out at night? And even if so, why does the curvature of distortion just happen to equal the curvature of the sun's spotlight? Oh well, we can overlook that for now. Here's a diagram of the effect of the distortion in question:
Wait a minute -- so the lines in the center won't be distorted. And the photo above depicts the horizon in the center of the frame, so how can this explanation be valid? "But what if," cries the floundering FE'er, "what if it WAS at the top of the frame and the author cropped it?" Well, no. The pixel dimensions here are 2048 x 1536, which is the standard size for this camera. We are seeing a full frame.
"Alright," sputters the FE'er, "so lens distortion may not have any noticeable effect in some cases, but there's no way to know for sure if this is one of those cases!" Having dodged a bullet, he wipes the sweat from his brow and continues, "Say, have I ever told you about the Bedford--" Hey, not so fast. There
is a way to know for sure. Lens distortion is not some random, amorphous phenomenon. To believe that it is is to deny the field of optics. I think Tom Bishop trusts that field. I mean, look:
Those glasses aren't just for decoration, are they? Or perhaps they're actually advanced technology developed by moon-dwellers which allows Tom to see practically infinite distances off the coast of Monterey Bay. But I digress.
You see, given any camera, we can know, to geometric precision, exactly how much distortion they create. In the case of this particular Canon, that value is 0.1% when zoomed in, or 1.1% when zoomed out.
Source:
http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/SD870IS/SD870ISA4.HTMThis means that we can follow a specific procedure to reliably reverse the process and see what the actual undistorted image looks like. Previously, I had done this manually by referring to the camera's
test image and seeing
how much correction was required to make the lines appear straight, with
expected results. This time, I'm going to be absolutely precise. Fortunately, there is an easy way to do this: The
PTLens application carries a database of correction parameters and applies the proper variables based on an image's EXIF data:
As you can see, it automatically extracted some information from the jpeg file and is ready to reverse the barrel distortion for me. Here is the corrected output:
(full size)As predicted, there is virtually no difference. There is still curvature. It should be clear that this is a major issue for a FET adherent, but if you're having trouble following along, consider my analogy:
The RE'ers themselves posted evidence that these images are not reliable, and feature a significant degree of distortion.
No, the distortion is not significant, and no, it does not make the images unreliable. Let me explain how I disproved Tom by way of analogy:
- Tom claims that a person is no more 3 feet tall.
- I measure the person, and they turn out to be 6 feet tall.
- Tom claims that the measurement is faulty because the person is wearing shoes.
- I measure the height of a pair of shoes identical to the one the person is wearing, and subtract it from their height.
- It's still much greater than 3 feet.
- Tom is therefore wrong.
This is what I did, except with curvature instead of height.
We're left with the inescapable fact that the horizon is indeed curved.
So, if the earth is flat, why is the horizon curved? Can anyone answer this question
without making shit up?