These composite (fake) images do no service to astronomy

I agree with Paul. OTOH, *if* I were to complain about the image my complaints would be related to:

1) a dark Jupiter and Venus within brighter surrounding glows. The planets simply do not look like that - at least not to human eyes.

2) the ray from Venus sunward is not parallel to the ray from the moon sunward.

With a bit of added work a far more dramatic and realistic composite image could have been made.

Sketcher,
To sketch is to see.

On Thursday, July 2, 2015 at 12:05:13 PM UTC-6, palsing wrote:
On Wednesday, July 1, 2015 at 11:58:40 PM UTC-7, RichA wrote:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1507...angLetian..jpg

In this case I disagree. Had you linked to the original page...

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150702.html

... you could have read... "Imaged that night with the same telescope and camera, the rising Moon from the opposite part of the sky is compared with the planetary conjunction for scale in the digitally composited image. The full lunar disk covers an angle of about 1/2 degree on the sky."

The imager did this only to show folks who, for whatever reason, couldn't view this magnificent conjunction for themselves, to demonstrate just how close these planets appeared to be on June 30th.

Sure, the picture is an admitted fake, but was created for a noble reason..

\Paul A

Davoud wrote:
Mike Collins:
I agree with Snell. There should have been a border. Images like this can
keep turning up on the internet like the unfortunate Mars will look as big
as the Moon fiasco.

That wasn't a fiasco; it was a hoax that was spread by the unschooled
and uncurious. I don't think anybody was harmed by it, though
self-righteous amateur astronomers got pretty steamed.


My understanding was that the hoax was based on a post stating that at
closest approach Mars through a telescope would seem as big as the Moon
with the naked eye. Which was then altered and taken out of context then
dates changed etc.