Jupiter's horizon

[ffutures]

In The Struggle For Empire, the source book for FF XII, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are earth-like and habitable, just very big (but don't have crushingly high gravity). So I've started to think about what things would be like there, ignoring the sheer implausibility of this idea and assuming Earth-normal temperature, pressure, atmosphere etc.

One of the questions to cross my mind is if it would be possible to see things coming over the horizon. Which leads to the question "how far away is the horizon?" Fortunately someone has already worked that one out:
http://vastfrontier.blogspot.com/2010/07/horizon-distance.html

So the next question is how far it is theoretically possible to see through the atmosphere at sea level pressure? The answer seems to be more than far enough - the definitive source for this is probably Ringworld, which has visibility in the thousands of kilometers, and it seems plausible given that we can see stars from the bottom of our atmosphere. Anyone able to confirm this? And what would refraction effects do? Extend the distance?

While looking up Ringworld I found this rather nice animation

and there appear to be dozens of others on Youtube, Nifty!

Comments

[dsample.livejournal.com]

A big part of the reason you can see stars through a 100 miles of atmosphere, when things get fuzzy when looking through a couple of dozen miles horizontally, is that the air thins out pretty quickly as you go up, and most of the dust, and water vapour and other stuff that obstructs the view is mostly present in the lower atmosphere.

I would expect that on a Jupiter sized object, unless you're having a particularly clear day, anything out at the horizon will be pretty much obscured by the haze.

Refraction effects already extend the distance that you can see the Earth's horizon. Given Jupiter's lower curvature, they might even make the world look like you're standing in the bottom of a bowl.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

It's actually only 15km or so even on Jupiter, so I'm inclined to go with things being visible but hazy. I'm not sure about the refraction effects - you get the bowl effect on Venus in our universe, but that's a horrendously hot high pressure atmosphere.