Posts by: Andrew Silver

New research looks at the distance from which a candle flame can be seen. (Shutterstock/underverse)

By Andrew Silver

Can the unaided eye see the light from a single candle from 10 miles away? According to some claims on the Internet, the answer is yes – but now two scientists in the US have borrowed techniques from astronomy to show that a pair of binoculars would probably be needed.

The story behind this work began high in the Andes one moonless night when a candle was lit on the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory telescope catwalk. Somebody walked 400–600 m away and said the flame was as bright as the brightest stars in the sky. Nobody wrote down any numbers.

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