There’s only a couple theories as to why we perceive the moon’s size differently and the best one is context/contrast with the moon’s surroundings in our visual field. Pretty sure there’s a wiki article about it. Not settled science yet either. Remember going down a rabbit hole about that a couple years ago. Neat stuff.
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.
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.
In GTA Vice City, the moon changes size if you shoot it with a sniper rifle.
