The Photo of the Big Moon Is a Fake!

Shawn Trauntvein wrote:

It's a fraud, in my opinion. I blew up the picture and looked at it (I did not do this while at work today, and actually drafted, but did not send the email before today). As you begin to zoom in, the sky amazingly gets darker around the moon, even underneath the moon despite the sun being on the horizon. As you zoom in more, you notice there is some odd pixiling right on the edges of the moon, indicating that it was cut from somewhere else and pasted in (or at least that it and the section of sky it is in come from a different image)--part of why I say the pixeling on the boundary is odd is because it does not match quite with how the pixeling is working on the edges for other objects such as the mountains. It appears the moon image was taken with a different camera, or has a different zoom ratio than the rest of the picture.

What else is wrong? Well fortunately the image master did not leave any stars visible behind where the moon's full sphere would block out, but knowing that the moon is a full sphere, and with the zoom that is taking place, the crescent appears to end too abruptly on each side. If you zoom on it, the light drops off too abruptly at the points (like they were chopped off) and even if that were not the case, you should still be able to make out the dark image of at least some of the sphere continuing beyond the crescent. Also, for as large as the moon appears, I am not sure why the craters and mountains on the moon do not show more clearly.

I have not quite been able to decide if the reflection of the sun on the water was
repeated/spread, but speaking of water. Notice how the wave pattern changes between the foreground and a little further back beyond the "reflected sun". The water foreground seems to be different than the reflection/water background. There also appears to be interruption of the pixeling through the water/mountain reflection area, in a somewhat overly horizontal pattern that indicates some tampering with pixel coloring that is not present in the mountains or other portions of the image.

Mountains, now it is interesting that this is said to take place at the North Pole (not just near it) and there is not a mountainous land mass at the North Pole -- it is an expanse of Ice and these do not just look to be mounds of craggy ice, but appear more like land-forms.

So, I will believe this is altered. Snopes (the hoax website) simply says they have "no
information on the origins of this image". One other web-site pointed out that the sun-to moon size ratio would remain constant (not change simply based on one's location on the earth), so if this were real, the scene would be viewable other places. He also points out that the moon is disproportionately large. One other person argued that the moon crescent would have a bit of a tilt, and that the apparent tilt of the crescent increases the further North you go, and that the tilt exhibited would correspond to an
equatorial view. I did note in the night sky that the setting moon did have a tilt to it's crescent, being somewhat higher on the right side than on the left side (looking towards the setting moon in the West).

Love,
Shawn