Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2018

STRANGE IMAGES On the right, a rather unnatural view of the Moon photographed from high altitude (troposphere- stratosphere). In this case, the 'counterfeiter' has made several mistakes: the lunar disk is too large and its resolution is much lower than that of the ter- restrial soil; moreover, the inclination of the Moon and its location in the sky compared to the daylight conditions are inconsistent with reality. Below, an obvious false that wants to show the Earth as seen from the Moon. The surface in the fore- ground is very different from that of our satellite, and not even the alleged Earth shows clearly recogniz- able structures. Below, a suggestive scenario called 'sunset at the north pole with the Moon at the perigee'. It is actually a graphic elaboration of the as- trophysics Inga Nielsen, 'stolen' and spread by others on the web as a photography. If it were a real image, the apparent dimensions of the Sun and the Moon would be comparable. Above, an auroral ring as showed by many photogra- phies from devices in orbit. But this is not very convincing, in- deed, it is definitely false, and you can understand it from at least three important elements. The first is the absence of the at- mosphere, indeed, despite about 1/3 of the globe is shown, there are no cloud formations and not even the typical illuminated bor- der. The second suspicious ele- ment is the wrong position of the auroral ring, centred on the geographic pole rather than on the magnetic pole (in this period the two poles differ by about 400 km). The third suspicious element is the uniformity of the illumina- tion of the ring, which, instead, should be brighter and more de- veloped in the night hemisphere, and, on the contrary, less con- spicuous in the hemisphere illu- minated by the Sun.