Visually discerning the curvature of the Earth

WHERE IS THE CURVATURE?

How many times have you seen some Flat Earther post a picture with this caption?

I've also seen a LOT of normal, educated people who post images that show a falsely curved horizon.

There is a very good paper on this very question found in this paper:

Visually discerning the curvature of the Earth

As you see in that paper basically most of us can't and photographic evidence is always going to be problematic for "proof".  The truth is you really cannot tell much from a picture without some exacting details of when and where it was taken and under what conditions, using which lens, etc.

You can make the horizon APPEAR to curve any way you want:



Wider-angle lens give more of a barrel-effect as you can see here.  This is very clearly NOT the actual curvature of the Earth - this is a wide-angle lens effect:


Of course, you could just look at the imagery from the Himawari 8 weather satellite.

There is no justified way of dismissing that evidence... Except these goofballs scream fake and conspiracy at absolutely anything and everything that disproves them -- nothing is too baseless for them.


This guy turned a month of Himawari 8 imagery into a very nice time-lapse video.

The most critical piece of information missing from most photographs is the Field of View (FOV), if we knew that and some distances we could do some calculations to find out how much curvature we SHOULD see.