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Old 16-10-2007, 12:02 PM
lauriek lauriek is offline
Frozen
 
Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 170
Re: sunset at the North Pole

It's a stunning picture!!

In this day and age when nearly everyone has Photoshop or similar you do really have to keep an eye on other peoples photos!!

This was an easy spot, as another poster commented the sun and the moon are nearly exactly the same size when viewed from the earth (which is why we can see the corona when a full solar eclipse occurs). The Sun is obviously many times larger than the moon but its almost the same multiple of distance away. Now obviously both our orbit around the sun and the moons orbit around the earth are ellipses, so the distance between the various bodies does vary to some extent but its quite a small amount, maybe 10-15% at max. So the Sun/Moon should never be more than 10% larger/smaller than the other object. In this image the moon is over 1/3 of the shot where the sun is roughly 1/20th of the shot.

FYI To get an image of the moon that large in the frame, on a 35mm camera would take a telephoto lens in the range 500-600mm, maybe a little more. The image above is a composite of a wide angle image of the sun setting, together with a telephoto image of the crescent moon. It's very nicely put together!!

The North pole comment is a clever bit of social engineering. Had it not been stated then you would have thought, "hey why is the moon so bloomin' enormous", but hardly anyone has been to the N pole so it's easy to think that it could look bigger from there!!
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