On Jun 25, 4:32 pm, wrote:
On Jun 19, 8:49 am, Stealth Pilot
wrote:



I know we beat on you guys a lot here but here is a serious question
for you to explore.

scenario: you are flying along on a bright sunny day with no cloud
cover. your wingspan is about 20 ft, fuselage length 14ft and
tailplane about 8ft span. your altitude is 4,500ft.

you look down below you in the exact opposite direction to the sun.

what do you see below you scooting along the ground below you?
is it a sharply defined shadow of your aircraft?
a fuzzy indistinct shadow of your aeroplane?
or what?

it is quite distinct and you can pick it from nearly a mile away.

....now pilots dont tell them. these guys are actually quite
intelligent but not in' hands on' aviation matters. they should be
able to work this out.

John Gribbin's book 'Science - A History' contains a neat explanation
in the discussion of Fresnel's model of light on p408.

Stealth Pilot

Is this a test, or are you curious what the sim does? :/
In real life, you will see a vague outline of the plane,
but it will be pretty fuzzy in general.
In the present sim I use, "FSX" the shadow is always sharp..
They don't have that "fuzzy" technology down yet..
I have pictures of both real shadows, and can easily fire
up the sim for it's version if needed.
Dunno about 4500 ft though.. I'm not sure if he was
quite that high in the best examples I have, which were
taken from a Piper Cub..
The sim has the same Cub, so it would be easy to compare
real to sim, using the same exact aircraft.
But I can tell you right now, the real version is going to be
a lot fuzzier than the sim.

look up 'glory' in an aviation context.