NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2012 Dec 30, 13:06 -0800
From the orientation of the pyramids and the fact that the small pyramids, the "Queens Pyramids", look so large in the foreground, the photo must have been taken from fairly close to those smaller pyramids, actually, by my estimate only about 600 feet to the southwest. The Great Pyramid of Khufu is the farthest back, about a mile away. The best location for the photo that I can find is 29.970 N, 31.127 E. The image of the Sun as seen in the photo is near azimuth 021 (near NNE). Its apparent angular diameter in the photo is around 12 degrees. Obviously the size is impossible. The direction is also impossible. Even on the summer solstice, the Sun rises much closer to east. Although the Moon's Declination can be as much as 5 degrees higher so it would rise farther north, it's still not even close. Also, those "splotches" don't look much like the lunar maria that I know! I think they're just clouds.
Try this: go to Google Maps, satellite view, at the location above, and zoom in as far as you can. Now drag the "little man" for street view onto the map. It displays a bunch of blue squares each of which represents a photo taken from around that location (the markers are not always correctly placed). Near that spot, you can find several that show the pyramids in nearly the correct orientations and relative apparent sizes. By the way, for Alex, in a couple of them you can just see the small pyramids on the far side of the Great Pyramid. I'm glad I didn't notice those first, or they would have thrown me off, too.
-FER
PS: There's a nice trick in Google Image search --I think I've mentioned it before. Open one browser window with an image that you're interested in. Open another browser window showing the standard Google Image search page. Make sure both windows are visible side-by-side on screen. Drag the image from the first window and drop it onto the Google Image search box (the box expands to swallow it, letting you know you're doing it right). Google will search for images that are identical and also visually similar. You can even do this with your own photos.
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