Don't be silly, you're not Neil deGrasse Tyson. If he says it's shaped like a pear then that is It's shape.
He said it was slightly pear shaped, which is also what I said.
On your last trip in space, what did it look like to you, because all the pictures i've seen it looks perfectly round as a ball. So what is it, round, oblate or pear shape.
The WGS-84 Ellipsoid, which fits the geoid to within a few dozen meters, has semimajor axis (equatorial radius of the ellipsoid) 6,378,137.0 meters and semiminor axis (distance from center to either pole) 6,356,752.314245 meters, a difference of 21,384.685755 meters.
Questions for Yendor:
How large, in pixels, would be required to draw and ellipse of this shape for it to differ by exactly one pixel in major and minor axes?
How large are the pictures of the full Earth you have seen?
Have these pictures been compressed using lossy compression? Remember that such compression introduces artifacts and reduces the fidelity of fine details.
How sharp are the edges of the full Earth in those pictures? How many pixels would be necessary for it to be possible to distinguish a difference?
How carefully have you examined these pictures? Do you think you would be able to distinguish a variation in radii of perhaps a few pixels by casually "seeing" them?
Admit it, you haven't a clue what shape the earth is.
You don't have a clue; you say exactly that later. I certainly do.
If you truly trust NASA, you would simply say the earth is definitely round because that is what NASA's pics show.
How can you tell what they show? Have you actually measured them? Are the ones you've seen even good enough to distinguish between "perfectly round" and not-quite-perfectly-circular?
You see, I don't trust NASA. So all the pictures they show look fake to me.
Thanks for admitting your bias. In that case your opinion about this means nothing.
I honestly don't have a clue what shape the earth truly is. I just have a hunch it is closer being flat then it is round.
You know you don't have a clue what you're talking about, but you have an opinion about it anyway. OK. Thanks for sharing. Your uninformed opinion will be given the full consideration it deserves, which is none.
Alpha, you are just like the other REers, you can't see you ass for your nose.
Excuse me? Not even your insults make any sense.
No excuse for you. It means you have your nose stuck up your ass?
Wouldn't that be "you can't see your nose for your ass"? I generally don't dwell on subjects like this, so I'll concede to your expertise here. I
can see my nose, though, but can't see my ass, because, it's, well, behind me and all that. Where's yours? Can you see it? If not, why not? If so, why?
Everyone of you are a bunch of spoon fed zombies that believe what big brother NASA tells you.
NASA isn't the source for models of the size and shape of the Earth. See if you can find out where this comes from. Meanwhile, your uninformed opinion on these topics is worthless. Are you adventurous enough to become less uninformed? <Footnoted comment removed 'cause footnotes within quoted text are wonky.>
Are you saying that the imaging camera EPIC is not NASA's?
No, I said
nothing about the EPIC camera. I said the ellipsoid dimensions aren't NASA's.
Since you come back with completely irrelevant remarks, I presume you either didn't look for who does publish the data I asked about (perhaps because you didn't read the question), or, did, but didn't like the answer. Which is it?
Who
is the source of the ellipsoid dimensions? Do you even care? Are you going to continue to insist it's NASA, as though that makes a difference, without bothering to find out if that's right or not, as in "don't confuse me with facts, my mind's made up!"
It sounds like you guys and Neil are the authorities on the size and shape. I must be informed and not worthless, because some on here did not know Neil said that the Earth was pear shaped until I showed them.
The part about some not knowing that Neil deGrasse Tyson commented about the shape of the Earth is true, and if it makes you feel not worthless, then great! Still, you do seem to have misunderstood what he said, perhaps because he wasn't clear enough about what he was saying.
Why don't you wake up and get a brain or something you can use to think for yourself. You know what, your opinion about this means nothing either, simply because you don't own an opinion.
Excuse me? You're the one who admitted not having a clue about the shape of the earth then going on and then declaring what you thought it was. That's "thinking for yourself"? Sorry, that's willful ignorance - exactly the opposite of thinking for yourself.
At least I admit I don't know the exact shape of the Earth. That is more than what you would do. You would continue to lie and say, " I know the Earth is round", when like me you don't have a clue either. All you know is that globe setting in your classroom when you were in elementary school. Get over it, you're a big boy now. Start thinking like one.
Why did you change from "I honestly don't have a clue what shape the earth truly is" to "I don't know the exact shape of the Earth"? Do you see the difference? Did you forget what you said before? The reason I leave the quotes in is so what we all said is right there.
Since you're now asking about whether I know the exact shape of the Earth instead of whether or not I have a clue, I'd have to say "that depends on how exact you are talking about".
For many practical purposes, the Earth is a sphere. That's accurate enough for most everyday issues, like how far you can reasonably expect to receive a certain television station, what angle to tilt a solar collector, what direction to look to see a particular star on a particular time and night, etc. If you're doing higher-precision work, then the WGS-84 ellipsoid is a better approximation. In the case of extremely high precision, like high-quality mapping over fairly large areas, you'll typically use a reference ellipsoid optimized for the area in question (the North American Datum, NAD, is an example). These conform to the local equipotential surface better than the global ellipsoid because the geoid
is slightly irregular (to the tune of a few meters in most cases, up to a few dozen meters globally) due to density variations within the Earth. So the answer to the question "do you know the
exact shape of the Earth" the only honest answer I can give is "no". No one does, and probably, no one ever will, to some arbitrarily fine precision - for one thing, at, say, millimeter scales, it changes. But to the question "do you have
a clue what shape the earth truly is" my honest answer is "certainly; it's approximately spherical."
What are you talking about WGS-84 Ellipsoid for. I told you and showed you where Neil says it is pear shaped. Are you that dense, get with the program or have you forgotten what we were talking about.
Given the rapid replies, you must have skimmed the post and missed the part about "[the] WGS-84 Ellipsoid, which fits the geoid to within a few dozen meters". It's in the embedded quotes, up near the top, in case you want to check. I'm asserting that you can't tell the difference between a perfect sphere and the WGS-84 Ellipsoid given the scale and quality of the photos you see, and that difference amounts to tens of kilometers. That's what we're talking about. If you can't tell this difference why do you think the difference between the geoid and WGS-84, amounting to a few tens of
meters, would make any difference whatsoever?
So tell me how much difference, in pixels, between the polar diameter and equatorial diameter of an image of the Earth (you pick one), assuming it shape is the WGS-84 Ellipsoid? You haven't done that yet.
After you do that, how many pixels in the image would an 80-meter deviation from this amount to?
This is how you approach a question like this, rather than just making wild, uninformed assertions.
Have you found out how elliptical the Earth should look in those photos if the WGS-84 Ellipsoid is close to right? All I see here is more attempted insults and your opinion about my having an opinion (how meta); just another opinion based on ignorance, making it worthless also. You used to argue better than this.
Go ahead and make those calculations. See if you can find where (and how) the geodetic models are made. I dare you.
Still waiting for these calculations, not ignorant guesses. The ad-hominems are amusing, but don't help your argument.