Why was it so hard to take a picture of a black hole?

Re:Why was it so hard to take a picture of a black hole? by dragontamer on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @02:53PM (#19676251)

You can get a sense of scale from mountain landscapes or city skylines. As you get closer to the city, you get a better sense of scale and size based off of how much the city has grown or shrunk.

The moon is very far away, but it DOES grow and shrink as it comes closer and further away from us. Using the size differential, you can get an innate feel to the size of the moon. Technically speaking, just driving towards (or away from) the Moon will have you traveling closer / further away from it, and give you a sense of scale.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_distance_(astronomy)#/me...

The next time you drive to a major city or large, recognizable landscape, keep an eye on how big and small mountains (or buildings) are and how quickly they move parallax to the foreground. It really does give an instinctive sense of scale. Train this instinct well enough, and you can use it on the moon.

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Re:Why was it so hard to take a picture of a black hole? by ben_w on Tuesday April 16, 2019 @06:11PM (#19677817)

The trouble with driving (or trains) is that my unthinking processing treats the speed as constant and shrinks the distances. Even cycling 1080 km along the Rhine, from the North Sea to the Swiss not-quite-Alps had that foreshortening, though to a lower degree.

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