Usually when you see wacky space pictures, the Moon is unrealistically close to the Earth. What’s up with that?
I wanted to get a better sense of exactly how the Earth and Moon would appear from an observer in space.
Here’s a small version of the image. I used texture maps of the surface of the Earth and Moon that I found on the Internet. The relative sizes of the two objects and the distance between them should be accurate.
In the picture, the observer is 350,000 miles away from the Earth and the Moon, which are 250,000 miles apart.
It’s kinda trippy to stare at this image and then think about what the guys in the Apollo space program did. They went all the way over there, no really. They went that far away from the nearest McDonald’s.
