I'd never seen this before

On Christmas Eve, I got to go flying. I took a friend of ours on a 200 nm
cross country to drop her off with her family for the holidays. On the good
side, the visibility was as good as I've ever seen in the Southeast.
Probably 150 miles or more. I could see the Smokey Mtns waay north. Also,
on the way "out", there was a 25 knot tailwind, so that portion of the trip
went pretty quickly.

On the way home, I flew down low (3000 -3500' MSL) to duck most of the wind,
but still enjoyed the good visibility. Part of the way home, I saw a large
tower a long way in front of me. I was surprised, because the tower
appeared to be much higher than my cruising altitude. I didn't remember any
extremely tall towers NE of Atlanta, but studied the sectional several times
looking for what my eyes were seeing. Never did find a particularly tall
tower on the sectional.

Anyway, it probably took me 20 minutes to reach the tower and by the time I
reached it, it was well below my altitude, (which hadn't changed). After a
little thought, I realized that the curvature of the earth had resulted in
an illusion that the tower was extremely tall when viewed from a distance,
but was only 1000' AGl (or 1800' MSL) in reality.

I've heard of this phenomena causing confusion between aircraft approaching
each other at high altitude, but never realized it would occur with towers
and the like when visibility was good. It'll probably be a long time
before the visibility around here is good enough to see a tower from 50
miles away again.