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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 8814157" data-attributes="member: 58197">It's an interesting optics question: On a flat earth, considering atmospheric haze/refraction and the limits of the human eye, how far away is it possible to identify "a city white-shining on a distant shore, and a great harbour and a tower?"In the real world, we can see farther from a high place because it increases the distance to where the earth's curvature cuts off our view. That doesn't apply on a flat earth. But being in a very high place means that one's line of sight is passing through the upper atmosphere rather than the denser, hazier one at sea level. So we can assume that Tol Eressea was at the absolute limit of the best Numenorean eyes to resolve, and even a little bit of atmospheric interference was enough to make it lost in the haze. (And we can also assume that the Meneltarma was pretty damn tall.)But what is the absolute limit of the Numenorean eye? Well, for us regular humans, Google tells me that human-scale objects (i.e., ~6 feet) are resolvable at a distance of ~2 miles. Let's give the tower of Tol Eressea a height of 200 feet. Then we get about 67 miles. Say the typical Numenorean has 20/10 vision (because Numenoreans are better at everything), and a "farsighted" Numenorean has 20/5 vision. That gets us to 267 miles.267 miles seems pretty reasonable to me. But you could push it back farther, or pull it closer, by adjusting the height of the tower and/or the quality of Numenorean vision.(More challenging to explain is the statement that Tol Eressea was also just visible for farsighted Numenoreans who sailed west to the limits of the Ban of the Valar. The Ban forbade Numenoreans to go west out of sight of their own coasts. But if you can see Tol Eressea from the Meneltarma, and the only difference between the coast and the Meneltarma is the density of the atmosphere between -- which shouldn't make that big a difference -- then someone pushing the limits of the Ban must be practically on top of Tol Eressea. At this point I'm inclined to invoke magic and say the Meneltarma granted heightened vision to anyone at the summit, because I don't see how to square these statements otherwise.)</blockquote>

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