>This animation features actual satellite images of the far side of the moon, illuminated by the sun, as it crosses between the DSCOVR spacecraft's Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) and telescope, and the Earth - one million miles away.

Credits: NASA/NOAA

I made this stereo gif by using motion parallax to get depth, where you use the next and previous frames to make a stereograph. The top row is for cross-eye viewing, the bottom row for parallel-eye viewing

While this illusion is cool, the moon does appear much closer to the Earth than it is in reality. The moon is vastly farther than the impression you'd get from just this GIF alone

For those who don’t know:

Unfocus your eyes such that you see a double vision (4 sets of earth moon, 2 on each side).

Then move your head closer or away from your screen until you merge the left and the right double vision into a single one in the middle.

That will give you the illusion to be looking at a 3d picture.

This is FUN! They both work parallel-eye for me! 👍 I learned to free-view after one too many beers at geology Field Camp 38 years ago 😎

Thanks! I learned how as a small child from Magic Eye books, I loved illusion puzzles

Ya, same technique as those 3d eye illusions from the 90s.

This is very cool, but I'd like to see this of just the earth spinning on its own for a while too.

https://imgur.com/gallery/ZPtpLAE

This isn't quite what you asked for, that'll take me some time, but here's this for now

So stereotypical of the moon to do something like this smh

Can you explain this one more time? Aren't there already 4 sets of moons with two on each side? When you say "unfocus" your eyes, I assume you mean cross your eyes? And finally, when you say they converge into a single one in the middle, do you mean I'll see only one earth and one moon? I don't see how that can happen when they're not all on the same height on the screen.

Sorry to spam you with questions, but I'd love to see this work and I don't really get it from what you said here.

Yeah. It was hard to explain, but the idea is to bring the picture close enough to your face that you see it in double.

You can then adjust your eyes focus and the distance from your face so as to form a central optical illusion.

Similar to when you raise one horizontal finger in front of each eye. If you bring both fingers close to each eye. You can form an optical illusion whereby the tips of each finger appear like they have merged on opposite ends of each other.

Doing the same here with the picture can let you see a 3D optical illusion of the Earth and moon, albeit unfocused.

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I get the left right parallax, but why have two sets of images stacked vertically? Is the top different from the bottom somehow?

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Seriously, why do you need the vertical stack? We have two eyes horizontally set. Not four. Why do we need to see two earths when our eyes cross?

Yeah. But how do I merge the top and bottom after merging the left and right?

I was wondering about that too. I guess we're supposed to merge the top and bottom too.

It’s two variants for the two ways to see this depth illusion. For people who focus closer than their screen is (the top pair), and for those focusing farther, looking through the screen (the bottom pair)

This is really cool and very very well done! Good job :) It is usually very hard to get everything right with a stereogram like this, typically there are some doubled edges as a result of imperfections in the lateral separation of the capture locations, but I can't see any in these.

You mentioned that the moon looks closer to the earth than it actually is, and that's an interesting point to make. Typically our visual system is able to calibrate horizontal disparity information based on familiar objects/depth intervals. This is known as stereoscopic depth constancy. When dealing with huge objects and huge distances (such as those featured here) it is inevitable that some distortions will occur. These sorts of stereograms are also subject to what is known as the "cardboard cutout phenomenon" which is why the moon itself appears somewhat flat while there is a very clear depth interval between the moon and the earth.

Sorry for the essay, I just finished my phd on stereoscopic depth constancy processes and wanted to nerd out for a little in the oddly specific field i chose haha. Keep up the good work!

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Another way to think about “unfocusing your eyes” is refocus your vision on an imaginary object that is slightly beyond the image (in this case behind your phone). This is why people say to move the image slowly away from you while relaxing your eyes but it’s unnecessary- all you are actually doing is widening your pupillary distance to achieve the optical illusion, which is what naturally happens when you focus on things at longer distances.

Look at your phone, then look at something past it and you’ll see your phone doubles in your vision. Just do that to the picture until you see a third vertical set of photos. The effect is not very 3D in this case as it would be with a magic eye but it’s slightly more dynamic than just looking at the screen.

Thank you so much for saying that! And oh man, that's so neat. I never had the resources to go to college but if I had I would have worked on something stereoscopic too. I love to nerd out about stereoscopy.

You might like this, I used to do this regularly when I figured out the motion parallax process: You can watch the livestream of the ISS and as long as the camera is facing the planet so that the earth is moving left to right, you can place two of these streams next to each other, like a stereograph, and pause one for 5-10 seconds to see depth of the atmosphere. This functions like pausing the orbit of one eye while the other keeps moving, so you can in essence get live parallax of the atmosphere from orbit! If the ISS is over mountains, you can actually see depth to them. It's wild.

I make these as a hobby so if you'd like to see more I often post across the internet with this username. Have you made any stereo imagery yourself?

You can rotate the image to merge top and bottom, however this experience isn't ideal. For simplicity you can just merge the top or bottom two without worrying about the vertical axis

Some people don't cross their eyes but instead split or diverge them. This means the cross-eye image would be depth-inverted, where the depth of the Earth appears concave while the moon appears to be behind the depth distance of the Earth.

Basically, if you look at the top row while diverging eyes or the bottom row while converging eyes you will always see an inverse depth map.

Yes. The top row on the left frame is the previous frame in time, while the top right frame is the next frame in time. The bottom row on the left is the next frame in time, and on the right is the previous frame in time.

These will look different depending on how you view the illusion: cross-eye or parallel-eye. Top row is better for cross-eye due to how our eyes work, and the bottom row is better for parallel-eye for the same reason.

Ha ha ha ha. You dumb bastard. It's not a schooner... it's a Sailboat.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

|Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |L1|Lagrange Point 1 of a two-body system, between the bodies| |NOAA|National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, responsible for US generation monitoring of the climate|

^(2 acronyms in this thread; )^(the most compressed thread commented on today)^( has 7 acronyms.)
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Is that from Seinfeld?

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I'm glad to hear you enjoy this kind of thing! I had a quick look at your post history and you have made some really great stuff, keep it up!

When I first saw this I was wondering how you had generated the left and right images and thought you may have been using images captured at different times to simulate the lateral separation. That is a super neat way of approaching this stereogram, and it would explain why it works so well since you only have motion along a single axis (minimising vertical disparities, which can cause issues).

Unfortunately the stereo images I have made are rather boring, usually a texture patch that is magnified in one eye to give the impression of slant. However, it is something I would like to dabble in when I have some time off. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for anything you make in the future!

The top image is cross-eyed stereoscopic. The bottom one is wall-eyed. The entire difference is that the left and right images are swapped. Use whichever you like.

this image, when released, took me down a rabbit hole that resulted in me learning about Lagrange points. Nice memory.

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how is the top one supposed to work, bottom one works perfect for me but top one is wrong no matter what I try to do to make the images do, I can get them to match but the effect is wrong, I assume reversed probably.

Aww thank you! 😍 I really appreciate the positive feedback! I get a lot of pushback for calling some of my work stereoscopic, even though to me that's just a description of the medium

>When I first saw this I was wondering how you had generated the left and right images and thought you may have been using images captured at different times to simulate the lateral separation.

Yes! So glad people get it. There's something really magical about watching the world this way. I mentioned doing this with the ISS, however there's more macro footage of the whole globe rotating that this can be accomplished with, and it's amazing because this creates an illusion of depth to the sun's reflection off the Earth, which I did not expect. Vision is so cool.

I'm curious, as I discovered how to do this using self-teachings, are you familiar with a name for this technique? I've been referring to it as motion parallax but I'm not sure if that's entirely correct when making a stereograph out of two different frames in time.

Thanks again for your feedback!

I made this! https://imgur.com/a/IQGLcrR Unfortunately the source is kind of weird which is why this one isn't smooth, I'll probably try to find another source soon but here's this for now

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As the technique name implies, you cross your eyes until two images merge.

Muah chef’s kiss. A very thoughtful addition