Flat Earth Follies: Why Is This Continent So BIG!? NASA FAKE!

Flat Earth Claim

Why Is This Continent So BIG!?  NASA FAKE! LOLS [see video]

Suomi NPP VIIRS COMPOSITE image

The Facts

Well...

You know that thing that Flat Earthers get wrong OVER...

Crepuscular rays are parallel and only APPEAR to converge

and OVER...

Like how Flat Earthers excuse buildings hidden by curvature

and OVER...

Like when zooming in doesn't bring those buildings back

...called 'Perspective'?

Well...

The space station is only 250 miles above a planet with a 24,901 mile circumference...

SO YOU AREN'T SEEING THE WHOLE EARTH.

Are you somehow actually unaware that when you are closer to a sphere you can see LESS of it and therefore an object on that sphere will APPEAR to take up a larger portion of the visible whole?

Far Away (left) vs Up Close (right)

Even at 250 miles up your horizon is ONLY 1429 miles away aboard the ISS.  Because the whole Earth is BIG.  Even at 518 miles up the horizon is still only 2090 miles away.

So yes, a WHOLE CONTINENT is going to be a BIG portion of what you can see when the camera is closer to the Earth - and a SMALLER portion as the Earth is further away.

The above image from from the Suomi NPP mission which was a LOW EARTH ORBIT imaging satellite.  This means the images it takes are from LOW EARTH ORBIT - about twice the distance of the ISS, but still just 513-518 miles up.

And because we want HIGH RESOLUTION images this satellite doesn't take a picture of the WHOLE EARTH at once, it takes long strips of images.

And how do you suppose I manage to know these things?

BECAUSE I BOTHERED TO RESEARCH IT.

NASA explained in great detail how this works but Flat Earthers are such liars and terrible researchers they are ignorantly unaware of the facts.

How Suomi NPP VIIRS COMPOSITE images are made (credit)

Just because an image is a composite doesn't mean it is fake.  EVERY COLOR DIGITAL IMAGE IS A COMPOSITE - PERIOD.  CCDs do not take color images, they pass the light through filters which then stimulate different CCD elements in a grayscale fashion (just as the above image shows) and all those pixels are artificially re-colorized back into the image that is stored on your phone.

And when you take a panorama image it's doing the same multi-photo compositing as well.

That doesn't mean that Austin TX is FAKE just because this is a composite - this is good representation of Austin.  Sure, there is distortion in the image, that fence isn't curved like that.

Does this look like a FLAT horizon to you?

And guess what?  That is a 180° view of my horizon - the panorama function has distorted the image to FIT the center of the image into a straight line even though it is, in reality, 180° of a circle around me.  That fence is straight.   CURVE that picture into a half circle and you'll get a better idea of the actual shape.  Anyway, panorama images is a topic for another blog post...

And here is an image from Google Earth where I set my altitude to about 500 miles up and increased my FOV so I could see the whole Globe.  Oh look at that, the continent takes up a larger fraction of the image.

Google Earth SIMULATION showing how proximity = large continent

See also VIIRS imagery archives.

Conclusion

Flat Earthers don't understand basic optics or perspective or reality.