Celestia Forums

I was looking at Earth with my rings addon, and was looking from the center of the solar system, and I noticed that the rings on the side of the planet toward you around solstices look disproportionately compressed while the rings on the side of the planet away from me look over-inflated. I looked at Saturn and saw the same thing.

Is there some optical or psychological illusion I'm unaware of? Why do the rings look like this?

What's happening is that by getting very far away and zooming in, you're removing the perspective effects. When you're near a planet, the nearer rings look "larger" than the farther rings due simply to distance. You're used to seeing this effect, so when it's removed, the planets look weird.

Another thing to try is to get far away, zoom in, and rotate a planet. Notice how the surface features along the edge appear to move weirdly. Again -- this is a result of the removal of the perspective effects. At such great distances, the fractional difference in the distance between the observer and the near and far objects is much reduced.

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