And yes, I was trying to go for something that was easily in the public domain other than the sound of silence, and I happened to have Pachelbel’s Canon in D on my ‘puter.

Agreed, however I do so sometimes, but only and only then when it´s clear that the BA is out of town and it would otherwise be lost in time.
And ofcourse if it is on topic and adding to the post (and totally non offensive).

Let’s see if this :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElHKLYAMD4Y

works better for y’all.

Hmm .. you seem to have Pachelbel’s Cannon :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOA-2hl1Vbc

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachelbel%27s_Canon

playing a little slower than usual there. Still works pretty well though – cheers.

(What can I say, I’m a classic buff, its my Mum’s favourite song and yes, i’m a pedant! *Shrug.* )

Note : three links is about the maximum you’re allowed here I think – you don’t want to push that – I’ve found out the hard way before. I think. I’d also very strongly advise *AGAINST* trying to skirt moderation – it’s a bannable offence here understandably given the BA apparently has quite a struggle with spam and is rather temporally challenged.

*****

“The Ramans do everything in threes.”
- Arthur C. Clarke, ‘Rendezvous with Rama’, Final page (252), Pan
Books Ltd, 1973.

If I stick my face right up against the screen then the image of the sun looks bigger than it does if I go outside and squint up at it. If I sit back a few feet then it looks like a tiny dot. You might as well ask why when you take a photo of your house it looks smaller, cos it fits on a 6 x 4 inch bit of paper!

Also, who say the moon looks smaller when you view it from an aircraft? There’s nor reason it should, other than perhaps that you don’t have any nearby “earthly” objects to compare it to, as you do at ground level.

I’d guess that it has to do with the camera being very zoomed *out* rather than in. They were trying to capture not only the Sun, but the Earth.

For instance: on one of my little point & shoot cameras in order for the zoom to show approximately the same field of view and zoom level as my eyes I have to have it zoomed in to 3x. Any less and the camera would show things as being smaller in the final picture than what I could see.

I assume this is the same effect. The image has a very wide field of view, so in order to fit everything in the frame it has to either be stretched (and distorted) or everything has to be smaller. The 3rd option is to take multiple frames and glue them together with photoeditting software (to get a panoramic style picture), but it’s probably pretty hard to get multiple good images in a row with a balloon.

I’m a bit out of my depth here, but I thought I’d check if this makes any sense at all

You may be thinking here of the famous Moon illusion where the brain is fooled into thinking the Moon (& also constellations and Sun too) are larger when they’re nearer the horizon which the BA has written about on this blog before.

See for instance :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/07/very-large-moonset-but-not-why-you-think/

with links to another good article – and also see here :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/11/14/in-which-i-disagree-with-cartoon-neil-tyson/

Plus see :

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/08/26/does-this-perigee-make-my-moon-look-fat/

For the difference in size between perigee (Moon nearest us) and apogee (Moon furthest from us) and click on my name for this comment for a bit more on the negliable difference perihelion makes for our Sun’s apparent size. Hope that helps.