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Author Topic: Holy shit Moon  (Read 2248 times)

Qinetix

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Re: Holy shit Moon
« Reply #30 on: March 21, 2011, 12:16:40 am »

Hah , I saw it , it was so bright  :3 , yet i don't get it .-.
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justinlee999

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Re: Holy shit Moon
« Reply #31 on: March 21, 2011, 12:23:44 am »

I can't see the moon.

Also, I'd recommend you see the sun with your binoculars on.
« Last Edit: March 21, 2011, 12:26:06 am by justinlee999 »
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Il Palazzo

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Re: Holy shit Moon
« Reply #32 on: March 21, 2011, 08:44:47 am »

The sun image enlarged because of the rapid temperature change associated with the setting of the sun - all the light starts to refract slightly outward from the main photon stream. Because the photons spread out, the intensity at each point is less.
Citation needed.
No, seriously, that bit doesn't make much sense. How does the dimming(Rayleigh scattering) of the sun causes it to look larger? What's the correlation between rapid temperature changes and the dimming?(IIRC, this causes the "splitting" illusion)

The remaining part of the paragraph you wrote I agree with, however it's completely irrelevant to the question of the enlargement of the moon/sun disc near the horizon.
If anything, and if we were to be extremaly pedantic, we could say that the refraction causes shrinking of the disc, along the vertical axis, as the bottom part of the moon/sun is refracted slightly more than the top.
Also, the moon* is roughly up to ~6000 km(depending on the lattitude) farther from you at the horizon, than it is at the zenith, so it's somewhat smaller overall.

*so is the sun, but considering the distance, it's unobservable.
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RedKing

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Re: Holy shit Moon
« Reply #33 on: March 21, 2011, 09:00:19 am »

Yeah, I was underwhelmed with the world-breaking Supermoon. It was a little bigger than usual, but hey...it's the moon.

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