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crazygringotoday at 3:13 PM3 repliesview on HN

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...


Replies

LorenPechteltoday at 6:42 PM

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.)

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mrbtoday at 3:19 PM

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).

tombhtoday at 3:44 PM

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

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