Re: Possible RQ-180 sighting


Message posted by quellish (Member since 06/26/2008) on November 01, 2021 at 20:18:58 PST:

Joerg, I do not think that is giving you altitude. It's giving you the distance to the aircraft.

Imagine a laser beam from your position to the aircraft. From the camera sensor and lens specs you are getting the length of that laser beam. That would be the altitude if you were directly under the aircraft.

From your description, you were outside the restricted area while the aircraft was within it. Using Google Earth can you estimate what it was over, and from that your horizontal distance to it?

With that you can use the Pythagorean theorem to estimate the altitude. You have an estimated distance from you to the aircraft (based on wingpspan of 70 or 130 feet), and estimated horizontal distance, and can solve for the aircraft's altitude.

I am betting it will come out to be a lot less than 70k feet if you could hear it and it was creating a contrail

https://www.freemathhelp.com/q6-right-triangle/


In Reply to: Re: Possible RQ-180 sighting posted by Joerg (Webmaster) on October 31, 2021 at 17:20:46 PST:

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