Postcard of the Day

[fflo]

 

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I have learned to be suspicious of moons in landscapes. They are almost always unnaturally big. Humans seem to remember the moon looking bigger than it actually does, and if it's the natural size in a photo, it seems freakishly tiny.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Dang, I hadn't thought of that! Some additional evidence you're almost surely right about that with respect to this particular card is that it doesn't look like the moon part of the photograph was just painted, like the rest of the card---and if it were the actual size of the moon in the pic, they'd probably just not paint it at all, and we'd see the gray-white like we do in the places they didn't bother to paint. But this is yellow and no man-in-the-moon features. Cuz the moon was actually smaller there, if it was in the original photo to begin with.

That's part of the moon's woo-woo power over us, I say. The way it looks bigger to the naked eye than it does in the picture you snap on yer phone cuz it's so cool-looking but then isn't so cool-looking in the picture cuz you can barely see it.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

OK, somehow I thought that was a photo.

But yes, there's just a human memory and attention thing about the appearance of the moon. It's something that's very familiar if you are an astronomy person.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, it IS a photo. But a b&w photo that is colored for the cards. A common technique at the time (c. 1910).

[spikesgirl58.livejournal.com]

Ooo, I like this one a lot!