Line of sight is a strange thing. What you can or cannot see is often determined at an individual level depending on a range of factors, including your height, your eyesight, the weather, the size of the thing you're looking at and the amount of light available.
It's readily reported on Google that a human eye can see a candle flame 48 km away, but according to the MIT Review, research has shown that the furthest distance a human eye can detect a candle flame is 2.76km.
According to the Guinness World Records, the furthest photographed sightline in the world is 443km from Pic de Finestrelles in the Spanish Pyrenees to Pic Gaspard in the French Alps. Of course, we can see the sun with the naked eye, and it's 148.82m km away.
What a lens can record depends on as many factors as an eye. Type of camera used, what type of lens or zoom, what were the conditions, what was in the frame. You get the picture (or maybe not).
In the absence of official mock-ups of the Illawarra Wind Zone many, many images have been shared, making comparisons to wind turbines in the UK, the US, and Europe. Some are mobile phone pictures of the wind farms described; others are computer-generated to illicit a particular response.
Today's front page of Today's Paper carries a visualisation of the wind farm 10km away from Bulli Beach. The picture was one of four released by the Department for Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.
We've published the image in the newspaper, on the homepage of our website, on an article page, which can be viewed on desktop and mobile phone, Facebook, Instagram and in our news app - all the places where you read the Illawarra Mercury.
And guess what? That picture looks different wherever you see it. You'd be forgiven for thinking you can't even see the wind farms on the tiny image you see on your mobile phone.
Blown up on a large desktop computer screen, you might be horrified at what may come.
The moral of the tale is to take these factors into consideration when looking at the pictures, because your line of sight may not be clear.
Tell us what you think by writing a letter to the editor here.
