The moon

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.

In GTA Vice City, the moon changes size if you shoot it with a sniper rifle.
- the reason for this is kinda funny
- Just as in real life.
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.
- Also works for nukes
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.

Me: takes photo of a flashlight.

My samsung: 🌕

LOL that scandal is so funny, and I somewhat find it clever too.

Can't focus on the moon? Just slap a PNG on it bro :))

Too crisp. Should be a blurry dot.

If you're from the US, the moon is the size of a dime when viewed from 6 feet away. I don't know what a universal measurement would be for folks outside the US.

Anyway, it always cracks me up when people get hyped for a "super moon". This tiny object in the sky is going to be indistinguishably less tiny!

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?
- You would need a pretty good telescope to see a dime 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.
- My mom does the same thing. "Make sure you go look at the moon tonight. It's a super blue blood harvest moon that won't happen again in a million years."

My contribution to the thread lol.

Mine here, south hemisphere
- It's upside down, mate.

I am not a Samsung fanboy by any means, but there's no denying the cameras are fantastic: https://photos.app.goo.gl/4JwmReBsskSYNfzF9 was taken with a Galaxy s23 Ultra.

Oh ho. After some responses to this that Samsung was faking these, I went through some of my moon photos, and it certainly does look like there's a little more than just filtering going on. I added two images that I took back-to-back to the album. You can see that in one, the phone didn't recognize the moon as the moon because I didn't get enough of it in frame. What is in the frame is completely washed out with little detail. The one where it did recognize it, the detail is almost absurd. Sheesh! Disappointing. I might just go third-party camera app. Who knows what this thing is doing to my pictures.

Wasn't Samsung caught faking hi-res moon photos?
- I'd be impressed considering I took that picture myself. I'm sure there's some filter stuff going on that the camera app isn't entirely transparent about, though.

I think it has to do with the camera lenses on phones. The hardware and default settings are not optimized by default for scenic moon pics so the size of the moon looks way off.

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:

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)

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.

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.
- Samsung and Google claim that
  
  Apple announced they’ll catch up soon
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.