The Longest Line of Sight
7 hours ago
- #geography
- #algorithm
- #visibility
- The longest line of sight on Earth is between an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border and Pik Dankova in Kyrgyzstan, spanning over 530km.
- The project to calculate every single line of sight on Earth involved around a million billion calculations, resulting in 200GB of data.
- The algorithm was initially developed to find the best vantage points for viewing multiple volcanoes in Java, Indonesia.
- The project was revived with the help of Ryan Berger, focusing on optimizing memory throughput and CPU efficiency.
- The algorithm uses elevation data from NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), reprojected for accuracy.
- The world was divided into 2489 tiles for parallel processing, each representing a region with potential long lines of sight.
- The project outputs both the longest line of sight and the total visible surface area for any given point on Earth.
- A custom web renderer was developed to visualize the data, using bit-packing for efficient GPU texture loading.
- Future plans include higher-resolution data runs and potential expeditions to visit some of the longest lines of sight.