re: #170 LudwigVanQuixote

This is one of those things that I can’t explain over the webs - either people can see it or they don’t. It is kind of like hearing tonalities music, either people can hear the pitch and match it or they can’t.

The best thing for them to do like I am begging them to is to try it with something really long and thin and then try to remember the scales involved.

Why do you assume a contrail would be long and thin, that it wouldn’t get pushed around by wind differentials, spread out, have come from an aircraft performing a slow turn or gaining altitude for a trans-oceanic flight? You’re making a ton of assumptions here.

re: #140 LudwigVanQuixote

Then why is the top part of the plume illuminated?

And what about the more important question of projective geometry?

Why do you believe this?

It could be due to reflected light from the sky, the sky is a large diffuse light source, especially at sunset. Incident reflection can also come from a setting sun off an object high above the horizon when the sun is near or below it. You could be interpreting that as a bright engine when it’s not, or it could be a rocket engine, I don’t know.

Your assuming a straight trajectory when planes often fly in defined corridors, perform turns, change altitude, etc.

Because I don’t lend much weight to assumptions based on speculation and eye witness interpretation only, absent any actual instrument data, facts, or concrete evidence. I don’t know what’s going on in that video / photograph, and I’m certainly not positive that we’re looking at a missile or rocket. We don’t even know the focal length of the lens being used, whether pinch or barrel distortion is being induced or if this was truly captured by aspheric optics. We don’t know the size or resolution of the capture chip, and thus the angle distended by a single pixel. There is just too much we don’t know to definitively say this is a missile launch.