How come when looking at the moon through a camera, it's small?

Question

Just curious?

Answer 1

Ha!  Because it's really, really, really, really, really far away!

Answer 2

Because the camera is compressing an entire scene in to the viewfinder. It makes everything appear smaller.

When I take pictures of the Moon I usually use a telescope with a 1,000 mm focal length. This makes the Moon a nice size on a 35mm film frame or APS-C sensor.

Answer 3

Point your camera at something nearby.  Look at it through the viewfinder, and then without the camera, back and forth.  Many cameras actually reduce the size of the objects in the view.  This simple experiment will tell you if it's your camera or an illusion.  I could even be both.

Answer 4

you don't need a bigger camera, but a more powerful (bigger) lens.

y don't people in a photograph "look" smaller??

because ur brain compensates and perceives them to be the "right" size

PERCEPTION IS EVERYWHERE, AND IS USUALLY "WRONG"

Answer 5

The correct question to ask is how come, when looking at the moon with the naked eye, it appears far larger than it actually is.

Answer 6

Because the apparent size of the Moon IS small.

Half a degree.

Where the typical camera takes a scene that captures 35 x 50 degrees.

The Moon will therefore represent 1/70 of the height and 1/100 of the width of the typical picture.

1/70 x 1/100 = 1/7,000

The Moon uses up only 1/7000 of the pixels in the picture.

Don't forget that when we "look" at something, most of the looking is done by the brain.  The brain can forget about the useless stuff in a scene and concentrate on the important thing.  That is why we don't notice that the Moon is still small when we look at it.

Unless, of course, you are looking specifically for that (as I used to when measuring the apparent size of the Moon with a sextant).

But the camera (unless it has a powerful zoom -- I have one with a 300x zoom) does not have this advantage.  If the Moon fills only 1/7000 of the picture, then it fills only 1/7000 of the finder.  And your brain can't escape the obvious information:  "Dat Moon be small".

I use an extremely small CCD (about 300 x 200 pixels) that I put at the focal point of a telescope.  In that way, the Moon fills that "camera" just about exactly.

In this way, I can fool my brain into thinking that the Moon looks big...

Answer 7

You need a bigger camera.