![]() It is impossible to "see" this effect on a flat drawing. This is a real illusion and is not refraction or any kind of distortion other than what your brain and expectations do, but easy to understand with a very simple experiment. This weirdness is simply because of the angle between your direction of sight and the light rays which light the Moon. You look at the Moon and see it as if it were lit from slightly above. Here's what you would normally expect based on our everyday intuition:īut if we take into account that the Sun is really large and really far away, we'll get something like this:Īs an example, consider the following situation: the Sun is setting, and the Moon is in the opposite azimuth about $35^\circ$ above the horizon. But the Sun is much farther from both the Earth and the Moon, than the Moon is from the Earth: compare Sun-Earth distance of $1\,\text$ - it's $390$-fold difference! Thus although they form a triangle, the shading of the Moon doesn't seem to follow this, instead looking as if the Sun is infinitely far away. Intuitively we expect the visible objects to be of similar sizes and at similar distances. I think the impression of not lining up correctly is due to our intuition, which is based on everyday scales of distances.
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