RE: The sinking ship effect and the flat earth theory
There are two factors making details "fade" away in the distance, one is that there will be less light hitting the eye. That's why good binoculars and telescopes have big lenses - to catch more light. Again, the distance itself doesn't matter - to get better quality, it's just to increase the light-collecting area ... or eventually the time of exposure
The other factor is the air ... the air is really making things fade. Even with a huge telescope mounted in my mast, I probably wouldn't be able to identify a person on 7 nautic miles of a distance. This effect also plays a part when watching the moon ... but it only applies to the end of the atmosphere, and the craters you can see on the moon is very big indeed, many ordes of magnitude bigger than a person.
I think there are programs allowing regular persons to select targets for some of the huger telescopes, but there are only so many huge telescopes and so many astronomers and hobby-astronomers having wishes for them. Anyway, anyone can buy a telescope, it's only the wallet setting limits to the size of the telescope.
again, you need to bring us video proof. this just ain't proof to say you saw it with your binocaulers.
when Ships arrived in North America, they say the Native Americans could not see the ships. It wasn't until the shaman saw it that it became apparent to everyone else.
so perhaps you are simply blinded by your prejudice.
you see it as you think you should. but in bringing video proof, you may find you were in fact wrong and that you were lying to yourself.
I was actually surprised by this effect, I hadn't foreseen it, it didn't seem obvious to me that the eye height had that much impact on how much of the object was hidden.
Next time I'll try to back up my observations better. I should probably consider buying some photo equipment (not to do more experiments on the flat/round earth theory, but in general), my cellphone is kind of useless for capturing details in the distance.
I think my biggest point with this article was not to prove anything except that the round vs flat earth theory is something anyone can do observations on, without having to lean on second-hand information sources.
i'm looking into buy a p900. 83x zoom!