How High Do You Have To Be To See The Curvature of The Earth 360/VR

hello it's scott manley here with another vr video so this is not a regular video it's a video where you can move the camera around or if you have a vr headset you can point your head and look at everything here so this is me flying over the earth underneath the international space station what i really wanted to do was make a video to show how the apparent horizon changes how easy is it to see the curvature of the earth from different altitudes how high do you have to go before the curvature of the earth becomes obvious and the only way i could really think to do this was with a 360 video so you can point the camera and see how the curvature appears to change so we've had astronauts posting photographs from space you've seen photographs from high altitude balloons traveling at a hundred thousand feet and of course you've got mad mike hughes who took a lot of money from flat earthers so he could fly his steam rocket to a high enough altitude to show that he couldn't see the curvature of the earth and so using space engine i can compare all of these so we're going to start over the sea at an altitude of 1.8 meters so this is basically how tall i am and i'm we're standing in the water here now you might think that is some pretty amazing superpowers but just remember in this series of videos we've previously gone this close to a black hole and been okay so this high up you're stan essentially standing on a beach looking out your horizon is about 4.7 kilometers away but due to refraction of the atmosphere frequently can be a little further than that but we're not modeling refraction so the only way to see further is to go upwards and our first stop is an altitude of about 572 meters which is the same altitude that mad mike hughes achieved in his steam rocket at this altitude you can see for about 100 kilometers and also compared to the perfect like horizontal the horizon is 0.76 degrees below the exact horizontal so if you take the angle from the zenith all the way down to the horizon it would be 90.75 degrees so the horizon is moved down a lit just just by going 500 meters up now of course to get to this altitude mad mike needed a steam-powered rocket whereas us normal people have to contend ourselves with climbing a hill okay so let's go higher now we're headed for an altitude of about 10 kilometers and again many of you have probably experienced this because that's the altitude that many jet airliners will fly at of course on a commercial airliner you have the tiny little windows to look out rather than this grand vista you're experiencing now and that's of course assuming you're lucky enough to get the window seat and haven't been pushed out of it by a child who then of course insists on playing on their phone the whole time and climbing over you to get to the bathroom repeatedly anyway from 10 kilometers up the horizon now extends out to 300 kilometers away and the horizon angle is now 3.2 degrees below the horizontal some of you by the way might be wondering where i chose to do this so this is over the mediterranean just south of france so as we go up you'll start to see other countries that are recognizable in particular italy will stand out because of its famous boot shape anyway now we are going to go higher and enter a much more exclusive altitude we're headed up to about 30 kilometers or about 100 000 feet that's the kind of altitude you'd get from an experimental weather balloon or a high altitude spy plane like the u2 or if you were say some daredevil wanting to set a skydiving altitude record and no i'm not talking about felix with his energy drink promotion i'm talking about alan eustace who spent his own money and set the record and didn't even tell anyone until afterwards from this altitude the horizon stretches out to about 600 kilometers and the horizon is now depressed by about 5.5 degrees the curvature should be much more obvious now even at this low level of graphical detail incidentally i intentionally chose to turn the clouds off here so that they wouldn't be hiding any of the geographical features anyway let's continue onwards and upwards to an altitude of 100 kilometers now this is probably the most exclusive altitude it's only been available to sub-orbital vehicles and there's the x-15 the spaceship one spaceship two and of course new shepherd but only three of those have had people flying them it's a very small number of people that have reached 100 kilometers and then come back from this vantage point the horizon is 1 000 kilometers away you can see to the far side of italy you can see sicily now you can see the alps the horizon is now depressed 10 degrees from the horizontal the curvature is very much visible but of course if you're on one of these flights you'll only have a few minutes to take in this view before you fall back to earth okay let's go onwards and upwards into orbit although we're not going to be orbiting but we're going to an altitude of about 250 kilometers and this is roughly the average altitude that yuri gagarin was at when he was flying over africa on his way back to earth the actual vostok one orbit varied between about 170 and 330 kilometers so i chose an average and from here you can now see africa you can see all the way across the mediterranean the horizon stretches off to 1500 kilometers and the horizon is now depressed by about 15 degrees but yuri probably never saw this on vostok one he had an instrument called divisor which you could use to view the earth but it distorted the image a lot and it probably wouldn't have given him an authentic view of the curvature of the earth so let's head to the altitude of the international space station 400 kilometers up and from here yeah you have the cupola you can look down with your own eyes and you can really appreciate the beauty and splendor of planet earth below you at least that's what i'm told i would obviously love to experience it for myself from this altitude the horizon stretches out 2 000 kilometers the view is depressed by the horizon is depressed by 20 degrees uh from here you can see africa easily to the south but if you look to the north you can now see the coast of northern europe and the bit of england so that's the altitude the space station orbits at but the space shuttle has gone even higher in its highest mission it was up at 620 kilometers and could see much further actually apparently confused the astronauts from this vantage point our horizon now extends about 2500 kilometers in every direction you can see the whole of the united kingdom you can see ireland uh you can also catch bits of scandinavia there see all the way down to the straits of gibraltar and all the way out towards greece and turkey the angle to the horizon is now about 25 degrees below and in theory we are seeing more of the sky but i've obviously cheating a little here because i'm using space engines hdr rendering which means you can see the sun and the milky way in the same shot which isn't actually possible to do with a real camera but it looks pretty so i'm leaving it in and so the last real stop in earth orbit for us is about 1300 kilometers and that's actually up inside the inner edge of the van allen belts this was performed during the gemini program during gemini they were testing orbital rendezvous and docking so they would dock the spacecraft with the aegean target vehicle and after performing the docking in some cases they re-lit the engines on the aegena upper stage to push the gemini into even higher orbits so the highest orbit achieved by a human in earth orbit and not headed to the moon is about 1300 kilometers from this altitude the horizon is about 3 500 kilometers away uh if you look up to the north you can now see iceland just poking out north you can see all the way into scandinavia into asia deep into africa and also far off in the west we can see a dark area over the atlantic where the sun has yet to rise the horizon is now about 35 degrees below horizontal so that means the earth's angular diameter has gone from 180 degrees on the surface down to about 110 degrees which means it's well within the capabilities of human eyes including peripheral vision to see the entirety of the planet earth but given that most vr headsets may have a narrower field of view or you might be using the web app to view this i'm just going to bring the camera even higher up even further out so you can appreciate the planet earth in all her glorious splendor although i guess i forgot to turn the clouds back on so she's losing a little bit of splendor here anyway this is all very cool this is of course space engine not earth engine and i thought it would be nice to actually compare the viewpoints of earth from 100 kilometers up versus other planets and bodies in the solar system so let's return to 100 kilometers over the planet earth this time i remember to turn on the clouds so where should we go in first well humans have actually been to the moon that seems like a good place the moon is about one quarter the size of the earth so from 100 kilometers it looks like the earth does from 400 kilometers well at least in terms of the curvature obviously the earth isn't a gray barren hellscape the next planet humans might see with their own eyes would be mars for mars is about half the size of the earth again you see more curvature here and some cool details of valles marineris moving to the outer solar system this is europa which is about the same size as the moon you can see jupiter up there as well the radiation levels here are pretty high but it's not entirely out of the question that humans might see this one day and finally for the small bodies we have enceladus which is about 250 kilometers in radius so it's actually really tiny you can definitely see this thing is a spherical body now of course we can go to the largest planet in the solar system which is jupiter and view it from 100 kilometers above the cloud tops and frankly i don't think space engines doing a great job here but i would really like to take some juno cam images and try to map those because those can get down to like nine kilometer resolution but jupiter is huge and you won't see any curvature from 100 kilometers above the surface and pretty much the same is also true of saturn but at least you get to see that beautiful ring hanging over the horizon there but neptune on the other hand it's only about four times the size of the earth so viewing it from about a hundred kilometers is roughly equivalent to your view out of an airplane window at your ten thousand feet there might be possibility to seek some curvature here but we've only had one spacecraft ever visit neptune on a fly past and so we don't have amazingly detailed images of its surface and finally pluto one-fifth the size of planet earth even smaller than the earth's moon and yet it remains big in the hearts of people who remember it before it was called a dwarf planet so i hope you've enjoyed this little vr experience showing you what people have seen and what people might see with their own eyes and how the scale of objects affects how we see them in the sky and below us i'm scott manley fly safe

Channel: Scott Manley

Views: 886,893

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Id: xpUcZXiKtfU

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2020