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I made a valiant attempt to simulate atmospheric refraction, by creating layers of atmosphere and giving each layer its own index of refraction, found with various online calculators. Blender can do amazing things with refraction (see below, an exercise I did when learning the program), but it...

I am not. The refraction is due to temperature and pressure variance by altitude, right? That could get tricky. Part of the sightline passes through a thermal inversion. We can assume this because the clouds appear to be stratocumulus, whose tops are kept at a very consistent altitude by a...

Why the ATFLIR angle numbers do not change smoothly: While setting keyframes for the yaw angle in my Gimbal recreation, I noticed that new onscreen angle numbers appear only on frame numbers that are multiples of 6 (with an offset). This means, I think without any doubt, that the ATFLIR system...

Yes (there's also a planet under the clouds). I'm not confident at all about the size of the cloud features; that was just a back-of-the-napkin estimate. But that number has nothing to do with the new measurement from the simulation. The measured distance to the clouds is just a matter of where...

Yes, and man, you nailed me there. I was off by an order of magnitude. I saw 570000 (feet) on the calculator and read it to Siri as 57,000. The distance to the clouds at the bottom of the picture is 94 NM. I hope that works better for you. It's certainly closer to the 120 NM ballpark estimate...

I'm getting the first results from my Blender simulation. Here is a side-by-side comparison from the beginning of the video: In order to get the "clouds" properly in the frame, I raised them by 2,500 feet; initially I had them topping out at 6,500 feet, and now they top out at 9,000...

Have our calculations involving the ATFLIR's field of view been off by 40% or more? While working on my Gimbal simulation in Blender (which, like everything Gimbal-related, is very difficult), I realized that I have to constrain the on-axis roll of the camera to the on-axis roll of the...

Things get even weirder with the extensions of complex numbers: quaternions, which combine real numbers with three different kinds of "imaginary" numbers, and octonions, which have seven kinds of "imaginary" numbers. Quaternions can be linked to special relativity. In relativity, the three...

They do? The video Mick posted transitions almost instantly to a higher exposure as the plane banks. Watch the background noise suddenly increase. Those posts don't establish that. They talk about oxygen and nitrogen. The oxygen in the exhaust has largely been replaced by CO2, water, and other...

It's not a certainty, but between Mick's analysis and this analysis, all evidence points to rotation that is local, not distant (it doesn't necessarily have to be rotating glare). It is an assumption to claim that the object and/or its exhaust plume coincidentally rotated in concert with the...

Keep in mind that at 10 NM, the glare (not the source of the glare, which one assumes is smaller) is about 14 feet across. If it's a jet (for example), at that range the wings and fuselage (even head- or tail-on) would occupy a larger portion of the FOV than the glare, so we then have to assume...

I searched and searched for a size estimate of stratocumulus clouds, to no avail. But several sources for amateurs and kids suggested to hold your hand up to the sky. If the puffs are the size of your fist, they are stratocumulus clouds; if they're more like the width of your thumb, they're...

I posted the screenshots in the rocket thread because I think this is the first time we have a graphical representation of the constraints on the object's altitude. For all practical purposes, this seems to falsify the Atlas hypothesis except in the case that it's >500 miles away — and that's...

But we aren't seeing the object (which in this case would be the rocket plus its exhaust flume), we are seeing local glare at the camera. The apparent size of a distant, very hot object could be a small fraction of the apparent size of the local glare, in which case there would be no shape to...

But in the white-hot segment, the tops of the clouds are black, which would be expected if they're losing heat to space, as happens at night. If they were lit from above, I'd think the tops of the clouds reflecting the heat of the Sun would be lighter in white-hot mode. The "shadows" just seem...

That's a good account of pseudoskepticism. I'd argue it's broader and isn't confined to science denial. I've been planning a video about seven key "symptoms" of pseudoskepticism, objective behaviors that one can self-assess: 1. Skepticism not of complications to an explanation, but rather, to...

I'm impressed they finally used a differential equation. I've long said that if something this dynamic is mathematically modeled without them, it's obviously BS. This assumption of perfectly level, symmetrical pancaking is so bizarre. It's like looking at a shotgun wound and saying, "The shot...

Moderators, may I suggest that Mauro's "vertical cloud" hypothesis and the various responses be moved to a separate thread. While the effort is admirable I suppose, it has completely diluted more serious discussions related to any possible Gimbal/Atlas connection. The "vertical cloud" is just...

This is a strong claim. Can you show any example of a cumuliform cloud that looks like this, with a broad, generally flat face, but sloping uniformly upward? Your example below is a regular cumulus cloud zoomed in and doesn't resemble the stratocumulus cloud layer seen in the video...

YOU DON'T.