The moon

Brains and eyes are weird man

Best explanation I’ve seen is that humans judge distance and size assuming a relatively flat surface (a dozen miles or so in any direction is fairly flat even though the Earth is round).

Things far along the horizon tend to be small because they’re far away. This isn’t the case for the Moon. So our brains assume it’s far away, but it’s the same apparent size, ergo, it must be massive.

Like we know Mt Rainier is massive and far away, so given this photo, we might assume the moon is massive.

Higher in the sky, there’s no real point of reference. Also, you might visually process the sky as a flat layer above the ground, so the same parallax trick applies. I.e. the sky above you is closer than the sky/ground at the horizon. Therefore Moon is “closer” and appears smaller.

It's an illusion. Extend your arm to its full length, and stick out your thumb. Compare the size when the full moon is near the horizon, vs when it's closer to zenith near midnight. It'll be the same relative size.

yea the moon does look bigger when near horizon stuff but still the moon is much bigger through human eyes way up high too. i think we have tunnel vision and cameras DGAF.

When you look at the moon, your field of vision is the sky and its surroundings.

When you look at a picture of the moon, your field of vision is the picture of the sky and its surroundings, and the surroundings of the picture.

Basically you'd have to have your face close enough to the picture where you'd see ONLY the picture, for the moon to look as impressive as IRL (and I daresay it'd be out of focus).

I read somewhere that it's because human eyes focus on something that is the size of your thumbnail at an arm's length, so pretty small, and that distorts things a little bit so that what we're focusing on appears larger. Whereas cameras take in the entire field of view as their focus (at least phone cameras, lenses are a whole other ballgame), and all of that data being poured in at once means the distortion isn't there.

But that could be complete bull. I just read it somewhere on the Internet and it made sense lol.

Nvm, I read that wrong, sorry.

I'm from the US and I've been watching For All Mankind lately so I feel like a bit of a moon expert. I'm pretty confident that if I viewed the moon from 6' away, it'll look larger than a dime. But I could be wrong.

What about if it's viewed from 238 thousand miles away?

My cousin continues to share every single super moon hype post, and somehow (after several years) he still hasn't noticed or acknowledged that it never amounts to anything of note.

Wasn't Samsung caught faking hi-res moon photos?

Mine here, south hemisphere

Where's the /s

S21 be like: shit, gotta download higher res textures for that one

Photographer here. You're pretty much spot on. The reason for why this happens has got to do with three reasons, two of which are pretty hard to overcome:

1. Wide angle lens, short focal length. You can't fit a long focal length lens on a phone, because apparently no one wants a super thick phone these days. To get photos of the Moon with any reasonable detail you need a pretty decent telephoto lens (I get fairly good results with my 200 mm prime and so-so results with my cheapo 300 mm zoom)

2. Resolution. So not only can you only fit a small lens in the phone, you also just can't physically fit a large sensor behind it either. You have a tiny lens which passes through a tiny image on a tiny sensor, so phone makers have long since hit the physical limits.

3. Control software. Photographing the Moon is a special occasion as far camera automatics is concerned. The Moon is a bright object. It reflects daylight, dammit. Robot brain cannot comprehend this. In the nighttime, camera automatics scream "Aah! High ISO! Long exposure! Wide aperture!" You need to be able to tell the camera you really want daylight ISO and daylight exposure time and daylight aperture. (usual rule of thumb: ISO 100, 1/100 seconds, f/11) Now, the software in phones tries to usually approach this by letting you specify scenarios, but even the vague "night mode" is hit and miss for me sometimes. Fortunately this is something that is usually easy to rectify, because it's a software issue. (Open Camera for Android is pretty sweet, gives you full manual mode.)

It's the human eye and brain that increase the subjective size of the moon.

To test this, turn away from the moon and hold your thumb and index finger at arm's length in front of your face and apart just enough to touch the edges of the moon. Without bringing your thumb and index finger closer together, and still keeping them at arm's turn back towards the moon and see if you got the size right. You'll find that the size of the moon is closer to what your camera displayed.

I've heard that neweriPhone camera "AI" adds made-up details to moon pictures, but I don't think they increase the subjective size.

Well partly, but part of it is just no one has a very good mental idea of how big the moon is (if you hold out your hand at arm's length you should be able to cover it with the width of your thumb). When you see it pretty close to the horizon with actual context it looks a lot bigger than it really is. But then when you take a picture of it all that context goes away because you zoom in on the moon.