Recently, Astronaut Jack Fischer posted a video fly over of the US from space. The size appeared very wrong to me.
You are not seeing the curvature of the earth.
Here's the tweet:
Here's a circle: If divided to 36 slices, you can further divide each slice by 10 for 360 slices, or 360 degrees.
Here's the arc of the pic placed on the circle: The Southern California lights appear to take up 1 slice of arc length of the 36 slice version (which would be 10 slices of a 360 version)
I made the picture slightly smaller than its arc suggests to give it the benefit of the doubt, but the Southern CA lights still appear to take up roughly 1 slice of distance
For reference, I placed an NOAA/NASA image of the US at night, and you can see the rough shape of the light signature of Southern California, which are meant to be replicated with Jack Fischer’s video from ‘space’…
Here is Google maps for a distance reference. I used Tijuana to San Fernando to measure the greatest distance these lights could possibly represent…(it's 148mi/240km as the crow fly's, or 158mi/255km driving):
Here's the issue:
For a globe, earth’s radius is 3959mi, or 2pi(R) = 24875mi, and 24875/360 = 69 miles per degree
If there are 69 miles per degree (slice) on a globe, this correlates to 690 mi per 10 degrees, or 1 slice of the 36 slice version above.
So according to this, the distance from Tijuana to San Fernando isn't really 148mi, it's really closer to ~690mi.
The discrepancy is 690mi/148mi = 4.7x….
Put another way, the Southern California lights are 470% larger than what they should be, an error far too large to be a calculation/sizing issue. (So the drive isn’t really ~4 hours, it should really take you ~18 hours….)
Either a fish eye lens was used, and this is a misrepresentation of earths curvature, or it's fake.
Thoughts welcome.
