I got this picture in an Email today. Figuring it clearly a fake, I went to snopes in the aim of securing the truth. However, they have yet to uncover any information on the photo. Since y'all are the resident geniuses, I'd figured I'd pick your egg-shaped brains.

Also as an aside....what angle is the moon's orbital plane in relation to the Earth's axis?

Oops, almost forgot the link...

http://www.snopes.com/photos/natural/northpole.asp

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Surely the Moon is far too big to be the real thing? It should appear about as big as the Sun.

The Moon's orbital plane is inclined to the Earth's orbital plane by 5° 8' 43''.

The Earth's axis is inclined to the Earth's orbital plane by about 66.5°, so the Moon's orbital plane is inclined to the Earth's axis by about 61°. Right?

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With the sun on the other side of the moon, how do you get a crescent?

FAKE

Looking at the earth itself, I'd say this is a Bryce (or what's it called) image, not even a real photo.

Furthermore there is no reason whatsoever the moon would be that large overthere compared to the sun.

Plus what MrClean said .

Also, a photo aimed directly at the sun showing stars, how do you do that? (I'm not saying this last point is impossible, it's a question )

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Actually, the crescent is possible because the sun is also slightly under the moon causing a reflection off of the moon's surface to be visible. The water and the land however, upon closer inspection are clearly fake and were done with Bryce or Terragen. Lastly, the moon is far too large.

Fizaked.

Photo composite of two or more images or a completely synthesized image.

And what's that liquid water doing at the North Pole?

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0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 ...

Bryce I tell you.

Also look at the PJG artifacts in the sky: they're that symmetrical because that sky is calculated.

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Also, if you look at the photo closely, you can see that most of the image at high res doesn't have hardly any pixilation until you look at the moon. You can see where they cut, pasted and then did a blend.

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I knew that I had seen that picture before.

Water on the north-pole? Maybe because the ice is melting?

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It was the water that gave it away in my mind. It just looks....well....uh....fake. It was my understanding that the North Pole was in the middle of a great big slab of ice. Surely nothing up there that looks like rock.

Doesn't salt-water freeze at a much lower temperature than regular H2O?

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And what is that land doing at the North Pole as well?

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there is water at the north pole area (not at the very pole itself). The ice would not look like that however, indeed it looks like land on the "photo". Maybe it's Spitsbergen

Sidmel: you get the same kind of JPG artifacts if the moon had high contrast in the beginning. I don't think there has been cut & paste here, it's just a Bryce setup in my opinion.

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No need to blow it up to look for funny pixels, wonder about the water and/or land, or do any detailed thinking about this. Just mentally draw a diagram of the Sun-Earth-Moon system, and ask yourself if there is any way the Moon could look so much bigger than the Sun at the North Pole, when it's the same apparent size everywhere else.

The difference in size between the moon and the sun was a dead giveaway to me, without even looking at any of the other stuff.

(BTW, if you want to see a real picture of the moon taken in the vicinity of the North Pole, here ya go. Taken facing north at about noon local time, almost one year ago.)

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the relative sizes of the sky objects, the appearance of land, liquid water - all scream **fake**

But doggon pretty!

No. Salt water freezes just below the temperature where it reaches maximum density, while fresh water gets lighter as it approaches freezing. The reason you seldom see frozen seas in temperate latitudes is that as the water approaches freezing, it reaches its maximum density and sinks. The water can't freeze until the whole water column is at maximum density. I do see salt water ice in shallow inlets even in Connecticut; when the temperature is below 20F, 3-foot-deep water can freeze during a single tide cycle. However oceans only have time to reach maximum density all the way to the bottom in the far north and south.

It reeks of cgi to me too. The water looks very synthesised and the terrain appears textured.

A very pretty fake, however.

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So the list of reasons for it being a fake:

1. Moon is WAY too big in proportion to the sun
2. Large amounts of land is visible.
3. Too much open water even for summertime at the north pole.
4. Stars are visible within a few degrees of the sun.
5. Cut and paste marks around the moon are fairly visible even without magnification.

Any others?

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I'm not sure about 5, you get the same kind of artifacts with JPG compression without cut and paste. I'm sticking to the whole image being rendered from 1 bryce scene.

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Also, the text says sunset at the north pole, yet the sun is way to high for it to be sunset (which happens once near the fall equinox). looks to me it is still a couple of weeks from sunset.

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Not too much lower. For oceans, it's about a 1 C drop.

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That's close to my initial reaction: Since when does the moon's orbit run due north of the sun? If this is sunset/sunrise, then we're looking along the eclipitic (roughly), and this alignment can't happen at those times at more than 30 degrees latitude. (Well, looking closer, *maybe* if the moon's orbit crosses the ecliptic near the meridian, but chances of that are slim enough for my reaction to be valid.)

I'm curious about what the sender claimed. Was anybody claiming this to be genuine, or was it presented as just the pretty piece of art that it is?

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If snopes is investigating it I assume it is an email that is going from inbox to inbox with the claim that it is a picture from the north pole. It was probably just forwarded to Gruesome by someone - I don't think whomever sent it to Gruesome is making the claim. With picture-circulation like this it is almost impossible to determine who originally made the claim.

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The Email I received had the following attached:

"A scene you will probably never get to see in person. This is a sunset near the North Pole with the moon at its closest point. An amazing photo and not one easily duplicated. ."

I got a chuckle over the last bit.

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That is pretty funny.

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"Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience." -- Aldous Huxley

How is a horizontal crescent possible from either pole? Vertical crescent perhaps, but a horizontal one?

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Look at the placement of the sun as compared to the "moon". The sun is below the moon, where the horizontal crescent would be possible. I never said that the system in the picture is the Sol system, did I?

Good eye, Thomas(believer). I linked so Sunil could join in the fun.