Several people have commented on the differences, some questioning the accuracy of our videos (but so far, no-one has told us of an error we can actually check).   In order to understand why our animations might look different, see videos vs photos.

Start playing one of the animations and set it to the full-screen display at 720p resolution.  Take a ruler and measure the length of the black bar below the message at the bottom of the frame.  Multiply that length by 10.  Restart the animation and stand back the distance you have just calculated.  We have to do it this way because we don't know how big your display is.  On a 37" TV, for example, you may have to be about 2.7m away, whereas on notebook PC you might only have to be 1.5m away.  All the videos have the same scale, so provided you always view them in the same way, you only need to work out the viewing distance once.

Yes, we have. Because the turbines are so tall, and because some of the viewpoints in our region are quite elevated, curvature of the Earth has only a limited effect on visibility. As an example, the Needles cliffs, when seen from Durlston Castle 26km away, are not hidden at all by the curvature of the Earth.

The diagram above shows the geometry for a turbine that is "over the horizon", and the (approximate) formulae that you need to compute the unknown quantities.  As an example, if the observer's eye is h=2m above sea level (ASL), the turbine height is T=189m ASL as in our animations and it is 19km away (L=19000m), then from the formulae d=5053m, H=15.2m and a=0.0091 radians, or 0.52 degrees.  Note that even at this range, for an observer standing on the beach, only 8% of the turbine's height is shielded by the curvature of the Earth.  If the observer were higher, the shielding would be even less.

The animations are accurately scaled provided you stand the correct distance away.  (This is specified on each video)
 
If you took your computer to one of our viewpoints, played an animation and stood back the indicated distance, the image on the screen would appear to be the same size as the corresponding part of the real view beyond. Obviously, the screen would be showing only a small part of the background scene, because your screen is not very big, but the scale would be correct. It's as though you were holding up an empty picture frame, the same size as your screen and at the same distance, and looking through it.  If you had a bigger computer screen with more pixels, we could produce animations that covered a larger part of the real scene, but the apparent scale would still be the same (i.e. just as in real-life).

If you did the same experiment with your photograph (taken from the same viewpoint, of course) you would have to move it forward and backward until it looked the same scale as the background. If you then compared your photo with the computer screen you would find they had exactly the same scale.  The photo and the computer may be at different distances from you, and one may be showing less of the view because of its dimensions, but the important thing is that objects inside the images look the same size as the real background. It's like looking through two different empty picture frames to the view beyond - one frame may appear bigger than the other, but objects inside them look the same.

To summarize, we believe the animations are accurately scaled provided you stand the correct distance away.

We would like to do that, but your computer screen does not have enough pixels to show the turbines accurately if we make them too small. We have made a compromise between showing you a wide view – but with unrealistically fuzzy turbines – or a narrower view with reasonably well-defined turbines (the apparent sizes of the turbines, at the correct viewing distances, would be the same in either case, of course). Even our compromise means that the turbines are fuzzier than they would look in real life, but their scale is correct.

No, they really are that big.  An interesting fact is that the 164m diameter rotor of a 7MW turbine (like those in our animations) at a range of 19km has the same apparent diameter as a full moon.