One thing that comes from the Bullhead City Lights is a renewed appreciation for the difficulty in getting people to recreate photos. Here's the scene we want te recreate
We know they are stopped at the intersection, and they got out of the car.
The key indicator here is the angles of the curb. The one directly in front is nearly straight away. We can also look at the position of the two mailboxes. The closest daylight shot is this one:
Pretty good, but if we line it up with the Curbs and nearby trees, we get
Now the lights are in the sky. HOWEVER the city lights are also partway up the hill.
The key to lining up is to minimize the angular error. When things are close to you, moving 1 foot to the right can have a huge effect on the angles. But it will have near zero effect on more distant objects. So here, instead of lining up with the curbs and trees, line up with the houses down the road.
Unfortunately this is image is too low quality, and the houses down the road look like:
But I was sent this image, zoomed in on those houses
It's taken from maybe three feet to the right of the ideal spot, but that's a pretty small error in the distance.
I lined that up using the most distant things, the ridgeline and the utility poles. Those houses are also a good match. Using the lights on the houses, I could then line up the night shot.
From this overlay we can see that the bright cluster of city lights comes from around Hancock St
There's a second video (actually "Part 1"):
We see the lights of Hancock st there.
We seem to be seeing headlights and tailights on that street. At one point we seem to get some headlights that look
exactly like the "UFO" lights:
And if we look at the surrounding lights, we see thy are quite similar to the other lights on the hill.
