Vantage point
Updating to add: the photo is probably (or certainly?) a fake. Just look at it as a pretty imagining.
A snapshot from the International Space Station. That’s a little item called South America.
I had no idea the moon looked like that from the ISS.
That is very cool. Telephoto sense I suspect. Not how it would appear to the naked eye.
Rob is right, I think. The moon size is lens trickery: it looks very different to the naked eye. Telephoto lenses can do some marvelously weird things. The moon is about the size of a dime held at arm’s length from the surface of the earth, and also from ISS’s orbit.
Ah trickery. Good to know. I did wonder how it could look so huge from low earth orbit i.e. from a tiny fraction of the distance to there. Puzzled me it did.
At first I was going to agree with Rob, that this was taken at a low angle with high magnification. However, I suspect this is actually a fake photo, as there is a strange mix of lighting indications. Earth appears to be in full daylight, yet we can see the city lights, and the moon is in total darkness except at the limb. I suppose it could be argued that the photo was taken of Earth’s near-dawn limb and then artificially brightened (or it was a long exposure) to show off the geography as well as the city lights, but for an ISS photo it has an awful lot of jpg compression.
Yes I saw a comment that said it’s fake. Goldurn it.
I don’t quite agree with Holms regarding the lighting. I think all of that is pretty consistent:
What the picture seems to show is early morning over South America, with the sun just rising over the Andes. The area west of the Andes, on the Pacific coast, would then be in shadow, so it makes sense for the city lights to show. Also the phase of the moon is consistent with this interpretation. The sun would be just outside the picture on the upper right. That is alsoconsistent with the reflection in the waters of the Atlantic near the top of the picture.
I do think that the contrasts between the dark Pacific coast and the sunlit parts are too great for a single exposure. So I suspect a multiple exposure, with the images stacked using an HDR technique. (HDR for high dynamic range, a much used photographic technique for challenging light conditions.)
The one thing that does not seem right, is the relative size of the moon. It takes a fairly long telephoto lens to get the moon that big, but such a lens would not catch as much of the continent as is shown here. So the moon may have been artificially enlarged, or even photoshopped in. In any case, the picture looks cleverly made to me, with no obvious fakery other than (possibly) the size of the moon.
Potentially useful tidbit when trying to interpret this: The ISS flies at about 420 km above ground. From there, the horizon would be about 2300 km away. The photo seems to have been taken with the ISS being near the southernmost part of its orbit, I think I see the Valdes Peninsula near the middle of the picture.
Did it come from some NASA web site?
That’s pretty much what I figured Harald although I’ve forgotten almost everything I was taught about photography. I never really made the transition from film and paper. The latest craze with cell phone cameras seems to be having multiple lenses and then digitally combining the images in various ways to play with depth and angle of view. If Apple can do it in a phone, I suspect Nasa has the tech as well.
It’s not just the area West of the Andes though. The brightest city in the image seems to be Buenos Aires on the Eastern, “sunny” side.
Harald @ 6, I don’t know the original source, I saw it on Facebook, posted by one John Smith.
Bjarte: I thought that what we’re seeing around Buenos Aires was a cloud. Or more likely perhaps, smog. That would look pretty bright, seen almost directly towards the sun as here. But looking closer, that doesn’t look quite right either.
I did an image search on google. The picture is all over the place, but it seems over half the hits were in pinterest, many others on facebook. I came across a short discussion on reddit where someone asks about the origin of the photo, but no good answers came forth. Some said it was fake. In any case, I could not find the image on a single more trustworthy site.
I came across a higher resolution image near the bottom of this page. Handy for those wishing to scrutinize it more closely. I suppose the original image was indeed taken from the ISS, but that someone has been manipulating it afterwards. I must say, though, it is pretty clever.
Ah, that one’s from 2019. This photo has a biography.