Longest line of sight, an update
In our previous post about the longest theoretical ground-to-ground line of sight, we were not able to confirm the result found by Jonathan de Ferranti.
After a very interesting discussion with him and some experiments, we know why. Essentially, we model atmospheric refraction in a slightly different way, we are more conservative, while Jonathan is more optimistic. The difference is minimal, but at these incredible distances of more than 500Km, it could make a mountain appear or disappear. More than that, there is no way of telling which model is correct, because both are only rough approximations of what really happens.
After some tuning of the refraction model, we were able to recreate exactly the same view published by Jonathan: from Paramo Santa Ines (lat. 6.7791561891, lon. -75.693366807, 3370m), Colombia, toward the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta group, more than 500Km away.
[...] Update October, 21 2008: we found the cause of the discrepancy, as explained here. [...]
[...] month ago during our discussion about the longest line of sight (original post here, second part here). 25. October 2008, 09:00 show comments (1) Posted in: Posts Tagged with: 300+, bosnia, [...]