NASA’s Non-Fisheye Images

NASA maintains a database of astronaut photography in eol.jsc.nasa.gov that we can search by many parameters, including focal length. By searching for focal length above 28mm, we can ensure the resulting images are not fisheye.

Flat-Earthers claim all NASA images are fisheye. In reality, most images in eol.jsc.nasa.gov are not fisheye. NASA also preserves the images’ EXIF data containing the camera & lens info. Sometimes even the raw images are available.

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Bokeh

In photography, bokeh is the way a lens renders out-of-focus points of light. The shape of bokeh depends on the shape of the lens’s aperture more than the out-of-focus objects themselves.

Flat-Earthers fail to take properly-focused photos of stars and planets because of their lack of photography skills and because their cameras are not suitable for the purpose. They are just getting bokeh, which tells us more about their equipment (and lack of knowledge) than the actual intended objects.

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Camera Entrance Pupil Size and the Zoom Factor

The entrance pupil is the opening in front of a camera that allows light to enter. If it is partially obscured, light can still come through the unobscured part, and the camera can still see the object.

In one of those “experiments,” flat-Earthers placed an obstacle in front of a camera, very close to the lens, so that an object is partially visible. At the widest angle setting, the person appears partially visible. But it turned out that zooming in will fully reveal the person. Flat-Earthers claim it is how objects can vanish behind the horizon if Earth is flat and how they can reappear by zooming in. In reality, zooming enlarges the camera’s entrance pupil, letting the camera to see over the obstacle.

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Telephoto Lenses and the Appearance of Earth’s Curvature

A telephoto lens is a type of lens in which the physical length is shorter than the focal length. A telephoto lens has a narrow field of view, and as a result, the curvature of the Earth is less pronounced if taken using a telephoto lens compared to another lens with a wider field of view.

Flat-Earthers like to bring up pictures taken from the ISS that show a practically flat horizon, and use them as evidence of inconsistency. In reality, the images were taken using a telephoto lens with a narrow field of view.

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Quality of a Photograph

The quality of a photograph depends on the quality of the equipment. Higher quality equipment tends to give us better results than lower quality ones.

Flat Earthers like to use their Nikon P900/P1000 to take a picture of planets. When they discover their results have far worse quality than the images from NASA, they would conclude NASA must have faked them. In reality, it was due to their equipment are not in the same league as NASA’s, not to mention the skills to operate the equipment.

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Nikon Coolpix P900 and The Supposedly ‘Real’ Pictures of Venus

The Nikon Coolpix P900 camera is a very popular camera among flat-Earthers because there’s no other compact camera ever made that has such enormous zoom range. It is a unique and a very useful tool in this state of affair.

Someday, some flat-Earthers decided to bring their trusty P900s out and used them to take some pictures of Venus. To their delight, the resulting pictures don’t look like Venus we all used to know. They were too excited that they thought they have discovered an original ‘proof’ of global deception. “This is an irrefutable ‘proof’ that they have been lying to us!” so they say.

But, maybe there’s a simpler, more plausible explanation…

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