On June 1st, a video (above) was published on YouTube that appeared to show the moon falling out of the sky. Shot in Tenerife, photographer Daniel Lopez captured the giant moon as it approached the Mount Teide volcano, the ridge of which was lined with view-gazing tourists at the time.
In the clip, the large, full Milk Moon looks to approach the people as it sets. Then, as the planet continues to rotate, it falls behind the volcano ridge.
With the sun beginning to rise at the same, behind the photographer, the lighting is beautiful.
But why is this of so much interest to scientists and photography experts? NASA made it their Astronomy Picture of the Day on 4th of June and explained how the shot was captured…
Why does the moon look so big?
The video was captured using a telephoto lens which compresses the distance between the foreground and background in a photo or video.
In the shot, the humans are 10 miles away from the photographer and the moon is roughly 240k miles beyond them.
Why does the moon move so quickly?
According to NASA, this is not a bit of photography or editing trickery. This is really how fast the Milk Moon was setting at the time. The compressed distance between the moon and the people allows us to clearly see the speed of Earth’s 1,000 miles per hour rotation.
Isn’t our planet clever? And so is modern technology, for that matter.
This weekend’s moon forecast in the UK
This weekend, we will see the transition of the moon from Third Quarter to New Moon. We will have a New Moon on Wednesday 13th June. Our next Full Moon will be on the 28th June.
