Paper On Moon Illusions

Many optical illusions take advantage of our perception, being a "construction project" and our brain constantly trying to estimate the best guess, leading for us to be easily tricked. The moon illusion is an optical illusion which causes the moon to appear larger near the horizon than it does higher up in the sky. One of the most famous illusion and most widely discussed has been the so called "Moon Illusion". For many years psychologists have known about this and have proposed many theories to explain why this is possible, but we can say that most scientists who study human perception and illusion have not yet accepted any of the theories. The "moon illusion" or the "moon effect" has been discussed as early as the 7th century BCE, it has …show more content…
Astronomers thought the atmosphere must be magnifying the moon near the horizon, but cameras showed that this is not the case. The moon is the same size regardless of elevation. This proves that there is no relative difference in size of the moon at its peak and the horizon in that, that the moon's angular size remains constant as it moves across the sky. The experiments and theories for the "moon illusion" explain it with three main illusions - the angular size illusion, the linear size illusion and the distance illusion. The angular size illusion is when the angle of the moon's diameter curves at an observer’s eye measure exactly around 0.5 percent degree of an arc no matter moons location in the sky. The linear size illusion for many people is the horizon moon's physical diameter also looks larger, which is the third distance illusion. When the object appears to be larger this is a phenomenon called the size-distance paradox. The moon appears bigger because it seems farther away and the high moon looks smaller because the viewer raises his eyes or head to look at …show more content…
The angular size of the moon, which is about 0.5 degrees, is the same wherever it is in the sky. An object's angular size is a measure of how large the object actually appears to be, which depends on both actual size and the distance to the object. One well supported theory is that your brain "thinks" the region of the sky overhead is closer than the region of the sky at the horizon, so it adjusts the size of the moon's image. When the moon is near the horizon, your brain miscalculates the moon's true distance and size. Regardless of its elevation in the sky, the moon's angular size at the eye remains the same. Yet the horizon moon may appear to be nearly twice the diameter of the elevated moon. Another theory similar to the apparent distance theory assumes that we visual space without an accurate way of comparing vertical distance and horizontal directions. The apparent distance theory draws attention to the angle regard, signaling less distance contributed by the land. All versions of the theory are based on the horizon moon is at a greater perceptual distance than the elevated