Image Credit: YouTube / NASA / Daniel Lopez
This remarkable footage shows a seemingly enormous Moon disappearing rapidly beneath the horizon.
The otherworldly sequence shows a number of people on Mount Teide – a volcano in the Canary Islands – with the Moon filling almost the entire sky behind them as it sinks out of sight.
The video was featured as “NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day” on June 4th.
But is everything truly as it seems ?
The large appearance of the Moon in the footage is actually an optical illusion caused by the fact that it is very close to the horizon and the photographer is zooming in from a long distance away.
To the people on the mountain, who are actually watching the sunrise occurring behind the photographer, the Moon would have appeared to be its normal size.
The rapid movement of the Moon however is the real deal and the video hasn’t been sped up. That said, its speed can be mostly attributed to the movement of the Earth, not the Moon itself.
Source: Science Alert
