Quote:
Originally Posted by mountainman
When I worked as a placing judge, we matched the finish- slit up to the mirror's center. Somehow, it always shifted, and with us reluctant-especially during winter-to trudge across the surface, it usually STAYED misaligned.
That's one reason-but not the only reason- I never trusted mirror images in determining order of finish. For me, the mirror was only a LAST resort.
I will say it was sometimes helpful before high def and colored splashdowns in discerning which runners the noses belonged to. Working with fuzzy black and white images, that part could get much more dicey than players might have realized.
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Our Finish Lynx system had a calibration program that I ran pre-race each day, that assured (based upon STABLE points perpendicular to opposite sides of the track) where the exact point of the finish line was. In British Columbia, we had a federal regulator (we called him regulator Rick) who would RANDOMLY come up to my office and have me run that program in his presence to assure it was done regularly. When you ran the program, those stable points would leave an image (when the camera was running continuously) would leave EQUALLY spaced lines on the top and bottom of the scan.....If they were NOT equal,we would have to carefully manipulate the angle of the camera until they were of equal representation on the continuous scan.
I had to trudge out to the inner rail at once or twice a season, and clean the mirror (particularly when the Woodbine surface was PolyTrack that stuck on everything including your shoes walking out there...NASTY STUFF particularly when it got hot out)
If there was ANY question about perpendicularity (which I NEVER SAW) it would have been most likely from NOT having run that calibration program. On the computer screen image we had a perpendicular line that was mobile (laterally) that would be placed over each nose...IF the mirror and scanned image were out of alignment, that line WOULD NOT touch both noses exactly the same and that was something I NEVER SAW ONCE at the thoroughbreds of standardbreds.
To the original question: CENTER of the mirror