(The Moon’s surface in true color and high resolution, via China’s Yutu rover (JPEG Image, 4095 × 2768 pixels))
Okay, this picture is HUUUUUUUUUUUUGE, and it’s amazing.
It’s surreal to see a world without* an atmosphere and therefore a deep black sky. And before you claim it’s fake because there aren’t any stars, that’s because camera exposure to see the surface is too short.
*technically the moon has an atmosphere, but it’s around 10-100 trillionth of ours^
^assuming you’re reading this from Earth, and this isn’t being read in the year 2050 on a Mars colony
I was zoomed in on it, trying to figure out why it was making me vaguely uncomfortable and why my mind kept insisting this was fake, and I realized the problem I was having was that I was expecting atmospheric perspective to fade the contrast on the farther objects and make the horizon hazy, but….. no atmosphere.
i… am …disturbed
The preceding comment is interesting because it highlights one of the ways that our perception of reality can be culturally influenced.
You know how sometimes, when you’re watching a movie with computer-generated special effects, you can just tell whether certain scenes are CGI, even though you can’t put your finger on exactly why?
Well, one of the things your brain is picking up on to make that determination is missing or incorrectly simulated atmospheric haze; this is highly characteristic of cheap CGI because atmospheric haze is a huge pain in the ass to correctly calculate – most low-budget productions either omit it entirely, or else fake it with simple linear distance fog.
That’s why photos of the Lunar surface and objects in outer space tend to look fake to modern audiences: we’ve been unconsciously conditioned to associate wonky atmospheric haze with bad CGI.