Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

And I thought seeing Mont Blanc from my town Le Creusot, France (a 216 km line of sight) was very long... not! Apparently it would only rank 6th from the bottom of this list!

View on HN

That is very nice. Here from Reykjavík, Iceland, you can see Snæfellsjökull on a clear day (about 118 km away; featured in Jules Vernes’ “Journey to the Center of the Earth”), and it seems very far away indeed. I can only imagine 216, or let alone 500+ km distances.

It was the silouhette (before sunrise) that I saw. It looked very much like this: https://beyondhorizons.eu/2016/08/03/pic-de-finestrelles-pic...

Edit: this is awesome, I managed to use http://www.udeuschle.selfhost.pro to simulate the view of Mont Blanc from my city: its exactly 215.2 km away: http://www.udeuschle.selfhost.pro/panoramas/panqueryfull.asp...

And as it turns out this is not the max line of sight, there is the hypothetically visible Grandes Jorasses slightly to the left (221.5 km away). You have to use the 10x zoom to see it: http://www.udeuschle.selfhost.pro/panoramas/panqueryfull.asp...

You can see the Mont Blanc from the top of the Hohneck which is almost 250km. The first time when I was a kid, I couldn't trust my parents, it was like impossible to see something that far.

Thanks for sharing. I was curious and checked out the view from Hohneck:

http://www.udeuschle.selfhost.pro/panoramas/panqueryfull.asp...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com