Simulating a turbulent globe atmosphere, and its refractive effects on long-range observations, to silence flat earthers.
This code generates an animated vertical transect (sort of like these) marked with the refracted line of sight. Here is an example (with earth curvature exaggerated by a factor of 4):
Make sure you install the dependencies below, then after cloning the repo just type:
make
That should eventually produce a folder called output where you will find the finished files.
Note
Currently the only way to configure the simulation parameters is by changing them in the source and recompiling.
Besides standard elements of a UNIX-style dev environment (like cc or make), you will need the following dependencies:
| Name | Package names on Ubuntu apt repo |
Build stage |
|---|---|---|
| SDL_Image | libsdl2-image, libsdl2-image-dev |
Compiling |
| ImageMagick | imagemagick |
PNG scaling/compositing |
| FFmpeg | ffmpeg |
Encoding PNG sequence |
Single-command installation, if you're on Ubuntu:
sudo apt install libsdl2-image libsdl2-image-dev imagemagick ffmpeg
Tip
Notice that only SDL_Image is required for compiling or running the simulation. If you want to simply use the PNG sequence directly, then feel free to stop the build process after the simulation runs.