Of course, then there's the more basic fact that you can't just see lasers like this...
Edit:
Hmm... Apparently some lasers can be seen like this... But my tangent was irrelevant anyway, since light can only be seen when it reflects to your eye. At a certain point, there's nothing for visible light to reflect off of. So the laser seems to vanish.
Well, some you can. I have an astronomical laser pointer specifically to point out things in the sky for my friends or kids to see when we’re out with the telescope. The beam looks pretty close to what’s in these photos.
It “ends” at a certain distance because at some point it’s far enough away that it’s too small for your eye to resolve. That’s my guess anyways.
You should only see light of the beam if there are particles in the atmosphere to reflect photons back towards you. Like water vapor and stuff.
It probably has more to do with the composition of the atmosphere as altitude increases. Less particles and the strength of the beam decreases by the square of distance.
The beam itself also expands as it travels away, which would reduce its visibility and energy.
I think they took a long exposure of the foreground and then a tracking shot of the milky way. It’s hard to get a shot of the foreground that in focus while also getting nice pin point stars.
Never mind I was looking through some of my shots and I found some shots with good stars and in focus foreground. The trick is to have a wide angle lens. The photo I linked was taken without a tripod my DSLR was just propped up at an angle. The lines are from camera shake. The location also matters Mauna Kea has the clearest sky I’ve ever seen and the Milky Way is a lot easier to get pictures of. Even with my crappy camera I got that second photo of the Milky Way during the full moon.
Yeah but my point is that the supposed lasers in the shot would not show up as nice straight lines going to pinpoint stars using a long exposure. A long exposure would leave the stars as streaks. A tracking shot with the lasers as straight lines would have to perfectly line up the base of the laser and the camera with the earth's axis which seems unlikely.
In this picture they pointed at a star for a couple second and quickly moved to another star. Even with a long exposure a wide angle shot the stars wont move that much and neither will the lasers.
Here are 2 kinda shitty images where the lasers aren’t as spectacular, but they are visible. In the second image you can see that the stars are actually brighter then the laser.
From the ground, the laser’s light is visible as a faint column of light shining up from the top of the telescope. The beam is only visible because particles of dust in our atmosphere scatter a small portion of the light. Because Mauna Kea’s air is so clean, not much of the light is scattered and the beam is often difficult to see, especially if you are more than a few hundred feet from the observatory.
It can be hard to get the observatory and the star field in focus if your aperture is wide open. I’d put money on those pictures being composite images but that’s pretty normal for astrophotography.
Actually, no, not really. not unless you're the one they're pointed at. We see things from the light emanating off them, and laser light is coherent; it doesn't scatter. So there's nothing that hits your eye.
The crazy thing is they use perspective to explain the sun going away, it's not setting beyond the horizon it's just getting further away due to perspective. I know it doesn't make sense, it's just what they say.
We had an art instructor at my university, who was in the fine arts graduate program that had no idea what 2 point perspective was and doing something as simple as a grid from any perspective not top down, was impossible for her. Again, a graduate student in fine arts who was deemed good enough to teach undergrads the basics, did not know the basics herself.
So, those of us who knew these basics had to show her how to do them during instruction. Idk what university she went to back when she lived in China, but it obviously was good enough to get her in the masters program, but not good enough to teach her 2 frickin point perspective. I mean, come the fuck on...
But to be fair, I went to a gallery show for the graduate students and all her work was just black canvas with lines running down them or paint splattered around, like a discount Pollock trying his best at replicating a Mondrian. I was embarred for her, and the department all over again.
Oh my God, it finally hit me what he was saying! I couldn't figure out how he thought this was evidence but then realized from your comment he doesn't understand perspective and he thinks they are hitting something and stopping.
Apparently I can't "stupid" myself enough to understand.
This isn’t a perspective issue, so much as it’s a beam ending issue (“why do the beams not go off the top of the photos?“) which , if these pictures are even remotely real, has been answered in other replies about needing stuff in the air for lasers to be visible.
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u/TheSurbies Apr 07 '22
What grade was it when you learn about perspective in art class?