How Far Is Far?

I was up on a rooftop in the mid-Bronx (Belmont, to be somewhat more exact) last week and saw a familiar profile:

That’s Billionaire’s Row, on the order of eight and a half miles away. It’s no surpise that you can see a big building from a distance – that’s the essence of all skyline photos, and I’ve seen the Manhattan skyline from trains while much further up the Hudson – but to be able to pick out individual buildings while looking past so much densely-built-up city is remarkable. They have to be much bigger than everything around them, which the buildings of the Row are. Here’s a blow-up, with the antenna of the Empire State Building, another mile further away, just peeking up on the left:

There’s also a certain degree of luck involved. If the stair bulkhead on the right had been located a bit differently, I would not have seen anything. But still…