Look-alikes · Cook Islands · Heard Island and McDonald Islands
Cook Islands vs Heard Island and McDonald Islands
Two copies of one picture are 0% apart and the widest pair in the world is 100%.
Cook Islands and Heard Island and McDonald Islands are 26% apart. They are closer than 99% of the flag pairs in the world.
Where the difference is
Each colour on Cook Islands, matched with the nearest colour on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, and how far apart the two are, the number is the worst single tile, out of 255.
- #012169#0121690
- #ffffff#ffffff0
- #c8102e#e4002b28
The colour that separates them is a red: #c8102e against #e4002b, 28 apart.
How they are put together
Both were measured as a single-coloured ground, a canton.
What each one carries
Cook Islands carries a star. Heard Island and McDonald Islands carries nothing at all.
How the number was arrived at
Both flags are drawn at 64×48 and cut into squares 8 across. Each square is averaged to one colour, and the score is the worst single square, so two flags that agree everywhere except one corner are as far apart as that corner, which is the right answer to a question about whether anybody could tell them apart. 0 is the same picture; the number is the worst single tile, out of 255.
On that scale Cook Islands and Heard Island and McDonald Islands score 66.4 out of 255, which is the 26% above.
It cannot see everything. Both flags are stretched to the same box, so Indonesia and Monaco, which differ in nothing else, are measured as their reds rather than as identical. The look-alikes page sets out the rest.
Also close
The flags the pipeline measured nearest to these two.