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I don't understand these photos at all. Why does it look like there are two suns in two of the photos -- one at the horizon and one above? Is one of them lens

I don't understand these photos at all. Why does it look like there are two suns in two of the photos -- one at the horizon and one above? Is one of them lens flare or something? I don't think the top one could be an overexposed earth because we're obviously looking at the earth's dark side. And in the other photo (middle in the galley) it looks like a little bit of the earth is eclipsing the second sun.

piker 2y ago
Is the Earth bright like that due to the moonlight reflecting back?
zokier 2y ago
> I don't think the top one could be an overexposed earth because we're obviously looking at the earth's dark side It's Earth. Venus is also visible as small dot.
- verisimi 2y ago
  No stars though.
  - taberiand 2y ago
    You don't usually see stars during the day
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Because of the atmosphere diffuses all the blue from the sunlight all over the place. I've seen people demonstrate that if you know where to point a telescope, it is just about possible to make out some of the brighter objects — though I can't remember if that was a star or a planet… But in this case, the exposure is set at a level that even Venus isn't quite fully saturating the sensor.
      - taberiand 2y ago
        On the moon, the sunlight bouncing around is still enough to outshine the stars
      - crazygringo 2y ago
        Yup, it's less to do with atmosphere and more with exposure. Shots of stars at night have exposures of a few seconds to get them to appear. Shots in the daytime are more like 1/60 sec.
    - verisimi 2y ago
      Nor do you see Venus.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  It can't be though. It's earth's dark side. It couldn't be bright like that -- it's not physically possible, right? At best it would be a sliver of a crescent. Also, in the other photo, there's a dark circular object partially obscuring. That would have to be earth, no? Obscuring the sun, which means the object on the horizon is... lens flare even brighter than the sun, or something? Do people here understand my confusion? I'm not convinced the captions are accurate, because they seem to contradict what's physically possible.
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    > the object on the horizon is... lens flare even brighter than the sun, or something? This is a photo of sunset. The nature of sunset ought to be pretty easy to understand, from the point of view of the camera on a large object, the Sun seems to go behind the object and then it can't see the Sun any more, and we call this "setting". So no, the object on the horizon is the Sun, it's incredibly bright. I expect the problem is like with that "3.6 Roentgen, not great, not terrible" meme, you're assuming that a device (the camera) is giving you correct information but it was maxed out instead. The Earth looks bright from the Moon, as the Moon does to us. So lets call that 100% bright. Now the Sun is several hundred thousand times brighter. That's um... oh, it's 100% bright again, because we've maxed out the device.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      > The Earth looks bright from the Moon, as the Moon does to us. So lets call that 100% bright. No it doesn't, because as I've stated twice, it's the dark side of the earth we're seeing, because the sun is behind it. It's more like 1% bright, as compared to the moon's visible illuminated surface. Think how bright the dark part of a thin crescent moon is. That's how bright the earth is going to be in this picture. Close to black, except for maybe a sliver of a crescent similar in brightness to the moon's surface. So again -- this photo makes no sense. Unless one of the two objects is just lens flare, or there's another kind of artifact.
      - bodhi_mind 2y ago
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
Sun on the horizon, Earth above it. (See caption.)
croisillon 2y ago
Eu só queria te contar Que eu fui lá fora e vi dois sóis num dia E a vida que ardia sem explicação
- gus_massa 2y ago
  [This is part of the lyric of a song https://www.musixmatch.com/es/letras/C%C3%A1ssia-Eller/O-Segundo-Sol-Live/traduccion/ingles https://www.musixmatch.com/es/letras/C%C3%A1ssia-Eller/O-Seg... This kind of comments are usually downvoted here.]
lolc 2y ago
They say there are sun, earth and Venus in the shot. So the second most bright thing must be the earth. I assume the earth here is simply blown out from overexposure. With my digital camera I can overexpose a new moon if I set the exposure long enough. So I guess it works the other way too. Edit: Actually it looks like the moon surface is already mostly in the shade with the hills illuminated from the back. There must be a hill behind the lander. So this light was reflected twice and is rather weak. On the left there are some higher hills still in direct sunlight, they are blown out. Meanwhile, light from earth is reflected twice, but at an acute angle.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  > I assume the earth here is simply blown out from overexposure. That was my first thought but I don't see how that's possible since we're looking at the dark side of the earth. It can't be overexposed when it's going to be much darker than the surface of the illuminated parts of the moon. At most, the earth would have a tiny sliver of light at the edge and we'd see a crescent shape.
  - daemonologist 2y ago
    I suspect that crescent shape is so relatively bright the bloom/lens flare is obscuring the details of its shape and making it just look like a blob. There's a little bit of "flatness" on top which would correspond to the darker inside of the crescent (think of what you'd get if you did a threshold and dilation, except it's probably happening entirely in-camera). I also suspect the surface of the moon is not directly illuminated by sunlight, as you can see what appear to be brighter (higher elevation? more "westerly?") areas of the surface in the distance. It might be scatter from other terrain or the thin atmosphere. Hard to say without more information - on a world with almost no atmosphere and a "moon" the size of earth the usual visual instincts kind of go out the window. There's another photo here which might be clearer: https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2025/blue-ghost-lander-capt-2.jpg https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2025/blue-ghost-lander...
    - crazygringo 2y ago
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Why does it look like there are two suns in two of the photos -- one at the horizon and one above? I think that its a reflection (on what? internal to the camera optics, somehow?) In both cases, the second sun also seems to have a horizon occluding it, from the opposite direction.
runjake 2y ago
The photo’s caption says: “This image provided by NASA/Firefly Aerospace, Tuesday, March 18, 2025, shows the sun setting on the moon, with Earth and Venus in the distance.”
magic_quotes 2y ago
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpA9DORDkeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpA9DORDkeE. > we're obviously looking at the earth's dark side We are not. Why would we?
- crazygringo 2y ago
  >> we're obviously looking at the earth's dark side > We are not. Why would we? Yes we are. Because the earth is in between the sun (faraway) and the moon (where we are) and very close to the line between the sun and us (because they're close by in the image -- it's not like the sun is in front and the earth is 90° above us which would half-illuminate it, or 180° behind us which would entirely illuminate it). If you turn on a lamp in a room, and hold an object between you and the lamp, obviously you're looking at the side of the object that is in shade. The illuminated side faces the lamp, which is opposite you.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
Because there are two Suns and we actually live on Tattooine and George Lucas was right all along and it’s Elon Musk and Lee Harvey Oswald what tried to keep the Truth from coming out but Birds Arent Real and the Area 58 chemtrails prove there’s your Face on Mars, sheeple!!1

piker 2y ago

Is the Earth bright like that due to the moonlight reflecting back?

zokier 2y ago

> I don't think the top one could be an overexposed earth because we're obviously looking at the earth's dark side It's Earth. Venus is also visible as small dot.

verisimi 2y ago
No stars though.
- taberiand 2y ago
  You don't usually see stars during the day
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Because of the atmosphere diffuses all the blue from the sunlight all over the place. I've seen people demonstrate that if you know where to point a telescope, it is just about possible to make out some of the brighter objects — though I can't remember if that was a star or a planet… But in this case, the exposure is set at a level that even Venus isn't quite fully saturating the sensor.
    - taberiand 2y ago
      On the moon, the sunlight bouncing around is still enough to outshine the stars
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      Yup, it's less to do with atmosphere and more with exposure. Shots of stars at night have exposures of a few seconds to get them to appear. Shots in the daytime are more like 1/60 sec.
  - verisimi 2y ago
    Nor do you see Venus.
crazygringo 2y ago
It can't be though. It's earth's dark side. It couldn't be bright like that -- it's not physically possible, right? At best it would be a sliver of a crescent. Also, in the other photo, there's a dark circular object partially obscuring. That would have to be earth, no? Obscuring the sun, which means the object on the horizon is... lens flare even brighter than the sun, or something? Do people here understand my confusion? I'm not convinced the captions are accurate, because they seem to contradict what's physically possible.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  > the object on the horizon is... lens flare even brighter than the sun, or something? This is a photo of sunset. The nature of sunset ought to be pretty easy to understand, from the point of view of the camera on a large object, the Sun seems to go behind the object and then it can't see the Sun any more, and we call this "setting". So no, the object on the horizon is the Sun, it's incredibly bright. I expect the problem is like with that "3.6 Roentgen, not great, not terrible" meme, you're assuming that a device (the camera) is giving you correct information but it was maxed out instead. The Earth looks bright from the Moon, as the Moon does to us. So lets call that 100% bright. Now the Sun is several hundred thousand times brighter. That's um... oh, it's 100% bright again, because we've maxed out the device.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    > The Earth looks bright from the Moon, as the Moon does to us. So lets call that 100% bright. No it doesn't, because as I've stated twice, it's the dark side of the earth we're seeing, because the sun is behind it. It's more like 1% bright, as compared to the moon's visible illuminated surface. Think how bright the dark part of a thin crescent moon is. That's how bright the earth is going to be in this picture. Close to black, except for maybe a sliver of a crescent similar in brightness to the moon's surface. So again -- this photo makes no sense. Unless one of the two objects is just lens flare, or there's another kind of artifact.
    - bodhi_mind 2y ago

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

Sun on the horizon, Earth above it. (See caption.)

croisillon 2y ago

Eu só queria te contar Que eu fui lá fora e vi dois sóis num dia E a vida que ardia sem explicação

gus_massa 2y ago
[This is part of the lyric of a song https://www.musixmatch.com/es/letras/C%C3%A1ssia-Eller/O-Segundo-Sol-Live/traduccion/ingles https://www.musixmatch.com/es/letras/C%C3%A1ssia-Eller/O-Seg... This kind of comments are usually downvoted here.]

lolc 2y ago

They say there are sun, earth and Venus in the shot. So the second most bright thing must be the earth. I assume the earth here is simply blown out from overexposure. With my digital camera I can overexpose a new moon if I set the exposure long enough. So I guess it works the other way too. Edit: Actually it looks like the moon surface is already mostly in the shade with the hills illuminated from the back. There must be a hill behind the lander. So this light was reflected twice and is rather weak. On the left there are some higher hills still in direct sunlight, they are blown out. Meanwhile, light from earth is reflected twice, but at an acute angle.

crazygringo 2y ago
> I assume the earth here is simply blown out from overexposure. That was my first thought but I don't see how that's possible since we're looking at the dark side of the earth. It can't be overexposed when it's going to be much darker than the surface of the illuminated parts of the moon. At most, the earth would have a tiny sliver of light at the edge and we'd see a crescent shape.
- daemonologist 2y ago
  I suspect that crescent shape is so relatively bright the bloom/lens flare is obscuring the details of its shape and making it just look like a blob. There's a little bit of "flatness" on top which would correspond to the darker inside of the crescent (think of what you'd get if you did a threshold and dilation, except it's probably happening entirely in-camera). I also suspect the surface of the moon is not directly illuminated by sunlight, as you can see what appear to be brighter (higher elevation? more "westerly?") areas of the surface in the distance. It might be scatter from other terrain or the thin atmosphere. Hard to say without more information - on a world with almost no atmosphere and a "moon" the size of earth the usual visual instincts kind of go out the window. There's another photo here which might be clearer: https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2025/blue-ghost-lander-capt-2.jpg https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2025/blue-ghost-lander...
  - crazygringo 2y ago

dragonwriter 2y ago

> Why does it look like there are two suns in two of the photos -- one at the horizon and one above? I think that its a reflection (on what? internal to the camera optics, somehow?) In both cases, the second sun also seems to have a horizon occluding it, from the opposite direction.

runjake 2y ago

The photo’s caption says: “This image provided by NASA/Firefly Aerospace, Tuesday, March 18, 2025, shows the sun setting on the moon, with Earth and Venus in the distance.”

magic_quotes 2y ago

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpA9DORDkeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpA9DORDkeE. > we're obviously looking at the earth's dark side We are not. Why would we?

crazygringo 2y ago
>> we're obviously looking at the earth's dark side > We are not. Why would we? Yes we are. Because the earth is in between the sun (faraway) and the moon (where we are) and very close to the line between the sun and us (because they're close by in the image -- it's not like the sun is in front and the earth is 90° above us which would half-illuminate it, or 180° behind us which would entirely illuminate it). If you turn on a lamp in a room, and hold an object between you and the lamp, obviously you're looking at the side of the object that is in shade. The illuminated side faces the lamp, which is opposite you.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

Because there are two Suns and we actually live on Tattooine and George Lucas was right all along and it’s Elon Musk and Lee Harvey Oswald what tried to keep the Truth from coming out but Birds Arent Real and the Area 58 chemtrails prove there’s your Face on Mars, sheeple!!1