Why does the earth look so small in pictures taken from the moon, but the moon looks so big to us while on earth?

Question

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

Answer 1

When you’re looking at a photo on a screen, things look smaller than when you’re looking at them in real life. The Earths diameter is about 4x the diameter of the moon, so if you were actually there, the Earth would look about 4x bigger in the sky than the moon does to us.