Maybe I named him a bit too much, because he is just one of a much larger group that I tried to refer to through him as the one with by far the largest audience. My main poimt here is that groups of flat earthers refer to all round earth high altitude baloon footage as computer generated because they don,t understand wide angle photography and image processing, and there are groups of flat earth debunkers, including very notably Farina, that try to debunk that broken argument not by researching wide angle photography and showing that in general the computer generated part actually makes things much closer to reality and is a nececity, but instead ignoring the whole thing, ignoring that proper correction for wide angle lens or mirror correction can be delicate, and declaring the computer edeted or computer generated argument to beridiculous while showing baloon footage in videos and blogs that given the highly expessed curvature can't possibly be undistorted baloon altitude footage.
In this post I tried to address this by showing the absolute maximum visible curvature of a linear lens maximum baloon altitude photo is still quite small, so the footage used as proof of a round earth at best is calibrated computer corrected wide angle footage (making the computer edited/generated arguments of flat earthers something that needs adressing), it isn't actual baloon footage but LEO footage instead, or worst case, and I belief this is common, it is manually corrected footage that doesnt take lens or mirror properties into account, or even worse, it is raw wide angle footage lacking the needed distortion correction all together.
Maybe I should have made this post using jupyter notebook, but I thought keeping pretty much to high school level math would keep my post more accesible, and the great circle math while not that hard, would possibly make it less accesible. I could try an in depth post though.
But have a look at how Sabine adresses subjects like these. You won't find any such sloppy arguments or footage in her debunking. Again, Im using these two high profile debunkers as stand in for much larger groups of debunkers, and its not meant as a personal attack on Dave or directed praise for Sabine. And I'm pretty sure Davis great debunker in chemistry, as that seems to be his field of expertise. But for Sabine its partical physics, and she seems to put in extra effort the more the subject or argument is removed from her particular field.
If you are going to high-profile debunk flat earth photography and computer editing arguments, it shouldn't be too much to ask to look into photography and computerized lens correction steps. But most of all, if you do this and position yourself as scie ce communicator, the math for this should be simple for Dave with his background, he should long have noticed that the flat earthers do have a (misguided) point regarding much of the wide angle footage where the curvature given the reported altitude would imply planet that is smaller than its own moon.
Looks like I missed your reply. Gotcha now. About those YouTuber science folks, they're bound to slip up now and then, especially when they step out of their expertise. Sabina, for instance, was criticized by other YouTube peers over a Climate Change video, but I think she bounced back with a reply video or something like that. Despite the heat, I'm still a fan; her work is high quality. I also appreciate Dave's work.
Thank you for your explanations.