So are there pictures of what a distant mountain actually looks like over 500km across the Earth; that is the point after all? Or is there already a YouTube video of this?
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Longest Lines of Sight on Earth
41–50 of 164 posts
Re: Longest Lines of Sight on Earth
#42You can actually work out roughly how far away the horizon should be surprisingly easily. Just use the fact that if R is the radius of the Earth and you are at height h, then from you to the horizon to the center of the Earth back to you is a right angled triangle with one side of length R and the hypotenuse of length R+h. Therefore the distance to the horizon is sqrt(2Rh+h^2) which is roughly sqrt(2Rh). The Earth is…
I had this question worded differently asked to me when I interviewed to do an undergrad at Cambridge. If you have a rope that is wrapped around earth and you lift it off the ground as much as possible, and you see that it is 10km above the ground, then how long is the rope?
I was not able to answer that question right away, and their hint to draw it helped a lot. I did not end up getting accepted.
Re: Longest Lines of Sight on Earth
#43According to the local paper [1], from the top of Mount Diablo (east of SF Bay) it is possible to see Mount Lassen (approx 260 km away). "Although you can’t see Mount Shasta directly, you might be able to see part of the peak, refracted by the atmosphere." (That would be 380 km).
[1] http://www.mercurynews.com/2015/11/24/bay-area-facts-what-ca...
Re: Longest Lines of Sight on Earth
#44Does this mean that there is no known place (point) on Earth from which you can see some other point that is more than 538km away?
This is why some microwave radio antennas point up. They bounce the signal off the troposphere to pair with a receiver farther away than the horizon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropospheric_scatter
Re: Longest Lines of Sight on Earth
#45And I thought seeing Mont Blanc from my town Le Creusot, France (a 216 km line of sight) was very long... not! Apparently it would only rank 6th from the bottom of this list!
That is very nice. Here from Reykjavík, Iceland, you can see Snæfellsjökull on a clear day (about 118 km away; featured in Jules Vernes’ “Journey to the Center of the Earth”), and it seems very far away indeed. I can only imagine 216, or let alone 500+ km distances.
It was the silouhette (before sunrise) that I saw. It looked very much like this: https://beyondhorizons.eu/2016/08/03/pic-de-finestrelles-pic...
Edit: this is awesome, I managed to use http://www.udeuschle.selfhost.pro to simulate the view of Mont Blanc from my city: its exactly 215.2 km away: http://www.udeuschle.selfhost.pro/panoramas/panqueryfull.asp...
And as it turns out this is not the max line of sight, there is the hypothetically visible Grandes Jorasses slightly to the left (221.5 km away). You have to use the 10x zoom to see it: http://www.udeuschle.selfhost.pro/panoramas/panqueryfull.asp...
Re: Longest Lines of Sight on Earth
#46Mt. McKinley (6.194 m.) What country uses '.' as the thousands separator but speaks English? Or is this someone mixing their native language thousands separator with English? Or is there some weird interaction between country and language that makes this the preferred, or at minimum an acceptable standard form? I'm actually hoping it's one of the latter options, that would be something new to me.
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Re: Longest Lines of Sight on Earth
#47Mt. McKinley (6.194 m.) What country uses '.' as the thousands separator but speaks English? Or is this someone mixing their native language thousands separator with English? Or is there some weird interaction between country and language that makes this the preferred, or at minimum an acceptable standard form? I'm actually hoping it's one of the latter options, that would be something new to me.
TIL there's quite a few countries that use the decimal point as a thousands separator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Examples_of_use
All of which are not native English speaking countries. Which is gp's point. Someone is mixing English and their native language.
Re: Longest Lines of Sight on Earth
#48K2 incorrectly listed as being in New Zealand?
Looks like it. Aoraki is ~3,700m and this website lists "K2" in NZ as 8,611m (same altitude as the real K2 on Wikipedia - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/K2).
The Southern Alps are growing rapidly but not that fast!
Re: Longest Lines of Sight on Earth
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is indeed the case for the ones at the top of the list. The longest possible distance to horizon is a little over 330 km, but almost 40 of the items on the list have longer line of site. In fact, it looks like every item on the list is between two points that are each farther away than the other's horizon. That raises the question of among all places on Earth where the longest line of sight is to the horizon…
Hawaii would be where I'd start looking for that.
That looks like a good place to start. It's got a 4205 m peak, which would give 231.6 km to the horizon.
Next place to look is probably at Puncak Jaya in New Guinea, which is 4884 m, giving 249.7 km to the horizon. But there is enough other land in the general vicinity of New Guinea that there could be over-the-horizon peaks visible, so it would take some work to check.
Re: Longest Lines of Sight on Earth
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
And this is indeed the case for the ones at the top of the list. The longest possible distance to horizon is a little over 330 km, but almost 40 of the items on the list have longer line of site. In fact, it looks like every item on the list is between two points that are each farther away than the other's horizon. That raises the question of among all places on Earth where the longest line of sight is to the horizon…
Hawaii would be where I'd start looking for that.
Mauna Kea is 4,207m above sea level and can definitely see the oceanic horizon. Mount Wilhelm (4509m) and Puncak Jaya (4884m) are the highest peaks in the central mountain range on the island of New Guinea, which makes the ocean horizon probably visible from those peaks.
Western peaks in the Andes are perhaps 150-200km from the sea. A tall peak in that portion could probably see the ocean. Chimborazo (6263m) is ~215km from the sea as the crow flies, although there is a large valley ~100m above sea level in the way.
I don't think Hawaii is the best bet.