It’s because the actual sky is so large. When you look at the moon in real life, your eye focuses on it so it takes up more of your visual field. Try looking straight up and doing a 360° and you’ll notice just how large the sky actually is.
When you photograph the moon, especially with a wide-angle lense, it doesn’t fill the visual field as much because it maintains the objective proportions of everything within it, and projects that onto a flat image. So when you see it on a screen, it looks smaller because you hadn’t previously noticed how small the moon is relative to the sky itself.
Yep.
I hate it when people say “the human eye is 35mm” or whatever. It is not. It is black magic that paints visualizations however TF it wants, and we’re barely aware of it.
I’m glad somebody said this, because when it gets down near the horizon it looks big AF and everyone is all it’s just becuase it’s so small with no frame of reference, then you take a pick and it’s a dime on the horizon.
50mm is considered equivalent to what we see. At 50mm, the relative size of objects to each other equals our vision, not necessarily the field of vision.
I’d call that the brain, not the eye, but I think that the broader point stands.
This isn’t animated, though if you look at it fullscreen, it will tend to appear to be:
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/943e6298-132d-4206-855f-681e6c047354.jpeg
Is it blue and black or gold and white?
Square A and B are the same brightness:
These lines are straight:
The dress thing is just terrible, probably fluorescent lighting and bad white balancing. I’d bet money the real dress is white, but obviously the picture is blue.
The dress is actually blue and black in real life. I have never seen it in anything other than gold and white, myself.
The Journal of Vision, a scientific journal about vision research, announced in March 2015 that a special issue about the dress would be published with the title A Dress Rehearsal for Vision Science.[45][46] The first large-scale scientific study on the dress was published in Current Biology three months after the image went viral. The study, which involved 1,400 respondents, found that 57 per cent saw the dress as blue and black, 30 per cent saw it as white and gold, 11 per cent saw it as blue and brown, and two per cent reported it as “other”.[47] Women and older people disproportionately saw the dress as white and gold. The researchers further found that, if the dress was shown in artificial yellow-coloured lighting, almost all respondents saw the dress as black and blue, while they saw it as white and gold if the simulated lighting had a blue bias.[36][47][48][49] Another study in the Journal of Vision, by Pascal Wallisch, found that people who were early risers were more likely to think the dress was lit by natural light, perceiving it as white and gold, and that “night owls” saw the dress as blue and black.[50][51]
A study carried out by Schlaffke et al. reported that individuals who saw the dress as white and gold showed increased activity in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain. These areas are thought to be critical in higher cognition activities such as top-down modulation in visual perception.[52][53]
the A and B squares gets me every time. first time i saw that i had to take gimp and move it side by side to believe.
This is the first time the dress got me. I scrolled down it was white then it turned to blue black and I couldn’t see it as white again…
I love an optical illusion and I still reference this one, since it works for some people.
Some of them - like the classic spinning dancer or faces/vase - I can flip by thinking about it. Some are context-based, like the A/B squares above or various Escher illusions, where our eyes/brains add understanding that doesn’t exist in the image.
Even Yanni/Laurel ( and I’d love any other audio versions if someone has links )
The dress has *always* been white/gold. I never understood how this one worked. Not to reignite the battle…
The dress is amazing. I used to see the white/gold but now see the blue/black.
When it went viralnI was taking a remote sensing class in college (all about color, really) and we had a long discussion about it.
Holy fuck. Always said black blue but it was white gold this time for some reason.
Kind of bugged me that I couldn’t get it to go back, so I exited the thread, reopened, and boom, blue black again.
It’s ok. The demon that lives in my camera has the same problem.
There’s a book series – that I can’t pull from my memory – with a tiny demon in a “camera” who paints a picture when told…
Is this a reference to that, or just a complaint about FOV? Or both? If a reference, what is the book? I know it, but can’t dredge it up or find it by searching.
A bit of a reference to The Colour of Magic, a bit of a silly joke about not knowing how cameras work.
It sounds like Discworld to me
Yep, pretty sure it was in Colour of Magic, which I read not too long ago
what was the newspaper one? I thought they featured heavily in that, but i haven’t read all of pratchett in a while
The Discworld novel about a newspaper is called The Truth.
One also pops up in Monstrous Regiment.
Why can’t they paint it the way they see it? Usually the issue is photographs never capture what it looks like, but when painting it’s your perception that’s the reference.
I think that’s the joke.
For a secondary joke, consider that although the painter painted a tiny moon, the comic artist managed to draw a large moon.
I once shot a wedding that was scheduled around a full moon. I replaced the moon in the photos with a NASA image, color matched it, and made it like 5x bigger than the original.
Nobody noticed.
Not sure if you’re proud or chagrined that they didn’t notice. But you know that’s because you sized it right, because you were there and saw it. You made it look as magical as it felt in the moment.
Meanwhile corpo firms would have made it 50x as big because “bigger = better, right?”
There’s no subtlety in american business culture.
This is the kind of whimsy we need on here!
Some phones do that by themselves hehe
Mine replaces the moon with a precaptured image and matches the shape and color. I’m not sure how I feel about it
I hate how tech companies are now applying their fetish for a constructed unreality as “features” in photos we take ourselves.
The citizen science website iNaturalist has to remind people to turn off features like this, because it will clobber the details that identify a species to make things look more photogenic.
I would turn that off if possible, personally.
I would, too, but I have to admit it’s pretty impressive what a phone can do these days. That kind of processing power just hanging out in our pockets. It would have taken my first PC years to do that.
By the description, It doesn’t looks like something that requires that much processing power. Probably less than transcribing some audio, but I get what you mean, it’s impressive
Well I also think there’s something to be said for the sheer uselessness of it - not only CAN it do it, it’s not a major drain on battery life or anything.
Also, my first computer was an IBM PCjr, so my comment stands - transcribing audio would have taken that blazing 4.77 MHz processor a large amount of time. 128 KB of RAM, baby - we had the upgrade sidecar. 360KB floppy disk! 16 color CGA graphics, but since few games were programmed with that in mind, it was really four color!
Well I also think there’s something to be said for the sheer uselessness of it
Indeed. We have all this impressive technology, but what do we use it for? To create fake photos?
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Gross
That’s some professional work right there.
Wow. Meanwhile I asked then ti just slightly airbrush my balding top for the main photos, not all, just a few of the ones wed select for prints and they didnt do shit.
They could at least make a “before” pic where they add a lens flare and say they edited it out.
I swear with hills too, I can be standing infront of a thousand foot slope and the camera makes it look like you could throw a rock over it.
Obligatory moon:
Just bring $2200 of glass with you. No problem, bro. (Someone with an even bigger lens will surely show me up on this eventually…)
I managed to snag these back in 2021 with a Nikon P510, a superzoom mfg in 2012. Paid $35 at a thrift store! Good enough for my purposes, I suppose. My dslr is a Canon Rebel XS that I started with and now pair with a Rebel 35mm. Not trying to diminish your shot or anything, just comparing so people can see what you can still manage on a beginner budget
And this was the 2024 Solar Eclipse.
For said budgets, there are also a myriad of well established tricks such as teleconverters, gimcrack homemade contraptions involving cardboard tubes and magnifying glasses, stuffing the objective of your camera into a dime store telescope or… this friggin’ thing.
One of these days I am totally going to pick up an EF/RF mount adapter and one of those just for the yuks. I imagine the optics are godawful, but it still sounds like a good time.
Instead of a link to amazon with no preview image, would you mind including a screenshot for those of us who refuse to give Bezos the web traffic?
Oh hey, I own a XS Rebel digital and film SLR. It’s an amazing beginner camera with the right lens.
These are incredible!
The moon takes about half a degree of the sky’s arc. (So does the sun. That’s why total eclipses are possible.)
Since the horizons are 180 degrees apart, that means you could fit 360 moons in arc overhead from horizon to horizon.
Which looks impossible and demonstrates the optical illusion at play.
This is the best I’ve got
Best i could get with my Galaxy phone when the moon was just peaking out:
Best I can do…
Taken with a pixel 9 in Morocco…
Lol looks like exactly what Samsung phones do where the moon itself is replaced with a stock photo when it detects you’re taking a moon shot. People have replicated it by taking a similar looking photo of street lights and the resulting photo shows the moon in place of the street light.
Best I can do (taken with a Nokia 5.4 during the latest partial lunar eclipse that took place here in the Southern hemisphere) 🥲:
I brought a shot glass, but I spilled whisky on my lens
In the realm of hobbies 2200 isn’t so bad. Though I guess if it’s like camera lens it can go to the moon pretty quick.
You still need a camera body to attach it to. But yes, you can indeed spend any amount of money on lenses if you put your mind to it. And if you’ve decided you haven’t spent enough, you can always shoot yourself in the foot by picking up a camera that belongs to a different lens ecosystem than what you’ve already got and then start building up a pile of lenses for that…
it can go to the moon pretty quick.
I see what you did there.
So why does it do that? I know it’s something with the lens size but what specifically?
I think that the main factor is that you take photo that captures a wide angle and then view it on a relatively small screen, which doesn’t take up as much of your field of view as the original captured image did.
If you had a bigger display and a right distance, it would take up the same amount of your field of view and would feel bigger.
Though probably part of that is also that you feel/know that the moon is far away, so it must be actually huuuge, but the screen is closer, so it doesn’t trigger the same awe, on the subconscious level
Even then, the moon is just bananas small. Half a degree wide. The right display at the right distance would still make the moon look like a little speck. On your phone 12 inches from your face, a life-size picture of the moon would be 1/10 of an inch wide. Just tiny.
Oo, this is one of my favorites - it’s called Moon Illusion, and we don’t know why it happens! There’s theories, but none have yet borne out as conclusive.
one other factor is dynamic range of the scene, where we can see some details in the moon with naked eye, but in the photo without heavy post processing it will basically look like white circle, if you also want to have any other details in the scene other than the moon
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=dynamic+range+photography
there is also phenomenon called telephoto compression often used with the moon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephoto_compression
Dynamic range might play a role indeed.
I don’t “Telephoto compression” really applies here and I’m pretty sure that photo comparison you included is edited
photo comparison you included is edited
you mean the one with three moons? indeed it is, there are no three moons in the wild…
I meant that the size of the moon in these photos is edited and the actual effect would not look like that, so it’s misleading
If you hold your thumb out at arm’s length in front of you, your thumb nail is roughly the same apparent size as the moon. It’s tiny
It’s an optical illusion. When the moon is low in the sky your brain has more stuff to compare it to so it looks bigger. The truth is it’s always (basically) the same size in the sky, which is approximately the size of the hole in a sheet of notebook paper held at arm’s length.
I must be immune to this illusion because I’ve never seen it. The moon always looks about moon-sized, no matter where it is in the sky. And I don’t mean that as a joke where sometimes it looks like a big moon and sometimes like a small moon; I don’t think it’s apparent size changes much at all, without needing any of the tricks to prove it’s still takes up about the same amount of space in our vision.
Though I’m not aware of any of the other apparent size illusions that don’t fool my brain, like the two curved shapes or lines with arrows inward or outward. I was just always a bit baffled at anyone saying “the moon is actually the same size all the time”, and thought “no shit, is anyone saying it isn’t?” Turns out they were, I guess.
When a life long romantic faces reality they get upset.
When a life long realist is confronted by feelings of real romance, they very well may want to die when they also face the reality of it.
Be happy to be dumb enough to be in the first camp if you are.
