Why does moon in daylight looks transparent?
In: Physics
1. We imagine the daylight sky is blue and everything is in front of it.
2. But actually, the sky is just the atmosphere, and the moon is behind the atmosphere.
3. So the sky is *in front* of the moon.
4. It’s the sky that’s transparent.
I want to share a relevant trick in photoshop.
Say you want to insert an object behind a transparent thing.
Don’t make the thing transparent, make the object you are inserting transparent.
**The human eye can’t tell which of the objects is actually transparent**
It tends to fall back on remembering what objects are usually transparent.
In this case it’s not the moon that’s transparent, it’s the blue sky.
The blue sky is refracting blue light into your eyes.
Light being reflected by the moon is punching through the transparent atmosphere.
So the light from the moon is mixing with the light being refracted by the atmosphere.
Your brain interprets this as something being transparent, in this case you seem to have interpreted it as the moon being transparent.
You know how objects in the distance look like far minecraft rendering? Basically but up.
This might seem like a dumb question and I get that the sky acts like a foreground to make the moon look transparent, but where does the sky go at night time? Shouldn’t the moon also look a little transparent then? Can someone ELI5 please?
It’s a bit analogous to wearing sunglasses. Your dark shades impart some of its tint to everything passing through it. The thing about the sky, it feels like a blue background, when it in fact it is a blue foreground. The blue is imparts to the Moon so seems like transparency against the rest of the blue….
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