It seems like all of the pictures taken from the moon show earth as relatively small compared to how the moon looks to me while viewing it most nights.
In: Planetary Science
When you get a chance, try taking a photograph of the moon with a phone camera. It looks big to the eye, but to a camera it’s actually very, very small when you take a picture of it.
A big part of this is that your brain is very good at focusing on things that are very far away and ignoring everything else. Especially for the moon, since there’s just so little else to compare to it to get a sense of scale or distance.
It looks big to you when you focus on it, just like a distant mountain or a tall building might, but it’s actually quite small in what’s called “angular size” – that is, how much of your vision it takes up. With a camera you lose the effect of how your brain sees it, though, so you can end up needing powerful telescopes to take a picture of the moon that looks the same to you as how the moon in the sky might look to your eye normally.
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