Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

This is so clever and interesting. Congratulations!

But... I want to see a photo! Or at least what it looks like in Google Earth, with a red arrow marking the furthest point.

It feels like the site is setting you up for the big suspense of the longest line of sight... and then it's just a line on a 2D map.

I think it would also really help if the maps themselves were at an angle in 3D with an exaggerated relief, with the line drawn in 3D, so you can get a sense of how it travels between two peaks.

It seems like you've put a ton of effort into this project. I think with just a tiny bit more work on the page, you could really put the "cherry on top".

And with those visualizations, get it picked up by a lot of major news outlets. This is a really fun story, the kind of stuff newspapers and magazines love to run. It's easily understandable, it's a cool new "record", it's a story of someone's perseverance paying off, and then you show a Google Earth image simulating the view as the payoff. (And from slightly above, if necessary, to take account for refraction.)

EDIT: Here, I used Google Earth to show the two points. Unfortunately it's from high above, since otherwise Earth wouldn't show the pin for Pik Dankova, but it at least gives a general idea of the area:

https://imgur.com/hindu-kush-to-pik-dankova-530km-adbVFwb

And here is the Google Earth link for the view, but it doesn't contain the pins:

https://earth.google.com/web/search/41.0181,77.6708/@36.6644...

For a 3D rendering of the longest sightline, see this direct panorama rendering: https://www.udeuschle.de/panoramas/panqueryfull.aspx?mode=ne...

Note that technically my link is a slightly longer sightline (longer by 7 km).

Thanks for the link! It's a very helpful website. It's a pity I can't find any info on the developers for the website.

It even points me to google earth website with the same view: https://earth.google.com/web/@41.059167,77.684167,5853a,0d,3...

Google chrome is probably necessary for openning the site.

Well this is just a personal website, so it is has much (or as little) information as the owner wants to put up. The legal notice page (in German) tells you it's the site of a certain Dr. Ulrich Deuschle: https://www.udeuschle.de/impressum.html

Google Earth shows what it looks like from above. That can be very different from what it looks like from a side view. I've hiked to many spots I saw from above with Google Earth--it can be hard matching up what I see on the ground with what it saw from the sky. It never looks remotely the same.

Also, there is a local sky island completely nontechnical wanna-be 12. Sight lines from up there are huge--except the two times I've been up there I couldn't see anywhere near as far as the supposed sight lines. Roughly 100 miles before all I saw was a haze. (And in a related thread some time ago one of these sight line plotters was getting it seriously wrong. It failed to show areas I knew I could see, it showed areas I knew were blocked by mountains.)

Google Earth can produce a side view just fine, it's just not designed for that so it can be tricky to get the position just right with the available controls.

And like I said, the reason I didn't do it here was because it hid the label on the horizon. But here it is:

https://earth.google.com/web/@36.43138439,78.74038717,4785.2...

But without the label you can't really tell what you're looking at. And the big problem is there's no "sideways" zoom like a telescope. Google Earth effectively treats zoom like altitude only.

In my experience while hiking tall things, the Google Earth view is accurate in terms of what you see, if you manage to get the viewpoint next to the ground like this. And you appreciate that the resolution is obviously limited.

Do you think there's any way to automatically create these Google Earth links for each of the longest lines of sight on maps.alltheviews.world?

There has to be, since it seems to consist of what I assume are fairly straightforward parameters in the URL that encode position and direction.

Looking online, it seems to be:

  https://earth.google.com/web/@<lat>,<lon>,<alt>a,<range>d,<fov>y,<heading>h,<tilt>t,<roll>r

where <range> is the "distance from camera to target point".

Apparently the tricky part is placing a pin, which belongs to an encoded /data= parameter, and from what I gather nobody's discovered how to set that data.

It seems that it might be possible to dynamically generate a KML file which defines everything (including pins) using markup, but it's not clear if there's a way to pass that or encode it in a single link to Google Earth (as opposed to the user having to manually load it once in Google Earth). Google Maps is basically the same as Google Earth in the web interface, so there might be a way to do these things there.

So it's definitely possible to do something, but figuring out exactly how far you can go might take some experimentation.

That sounds really promising. I've made a Github issue to make sure we follow this up https://github.com/AllTheLines/viewview/issues/61

Ok, it works better at that range--it's the resolution. Watching that load it's divided the world up into polygons rather than actually having an elevation map. Great at long range, inferior to a topo map at shorter range.

Thanks!

That imgur link is great, I totally see what you mean. So surely there is a way to at least automate linking to these views? I don't know about embedding them cos Google will want money. We're very open to suggestions, and PRs of course! https://github.com/AllTheLines/viewview

I had a slightly different question (that wasn't googleable), that you may be able to answer with the data you have.... What two points on earth are furthest from each other when taking into account the earth is an ellipsoid? I'm guessing Chimborazo and whatever is diametrically opposed to it, but is there anything else that's close?

Do you mean like if you drew a line from the surface on one side of the planet, through the Earth's core, to the other side of the planet. What is the longest line that could do that?

Yup... Figured it would be interesting if two people stood on opposite sides of the earth and could claim they were as far apart as possible, or if someone visited both "antipoles" and stood at the locations that were furthest apart.

Wooah, both "antipoles", I've never thought of that. What a great idea. In theory yes, we have the data, but I haven't begun to consider the maths to figure that out.

And then you each put a slice of bread on the ground, and have an Earth sandwich.

There aren't that many antipodes on land. It is mainly South America to Southeast and East Asia. With New Zealand to Spain.

Chimborazo's antipode is Sumatra. That may be the best, unless there is peak in Indonesia that lines up with Andes in Columbia.

Also spell out what "line of sight" means in this context.

It means a straight line that you can see to the other end while still being on the ground.

Long lines of sight are between stuff at high altitudes because at near sea level the horizon becomes a problem after only a few miles/kilometres.

Yes, I worked it out - just a suggestion for making the article better.

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