Talk:Crater illusion

Crater illusion received a peer review by Wikipedia editors, which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Crater illusion article.
This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject.

Put new text under old text. Click here to start a new topic.
New to Wikipedia? Welcome! Learn to edit; get help.

Article policies

Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Cognitive science (inactive)

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Cognitive science, a project which is currently considered to be inactive.Cognitive scienceWikipedia:WikiProject Cognitive scienceTemplate:WikiProject Cognitive scienceCognitive science articles

Astronomy Low‑importance

	Astronomy portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Astronomy, which collaborates on articles related to Astronomy on Wikipedia.AstronomyWikipedia:WikiProject AstronomyTemplate:WikiProject AstronomyAstronomy articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Image layout

Rather than splitting the images as left- and right-aligned. I think it would be better to combine the pairs of rotated images into a single box. Template:Multiple image or an image manipulation program could be used to accomplish this. Thoughts? VQuakr (talk) 04:10, 11 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I agree, the images would be better off side-by-side rather than separated by the text. Statalyzer (talk) 21:12, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Synthesis

Should only images that sources have cited as examples of this illusion, be used in the article per WP:SYN? Or am I being too cautious? VQuakr (talk) 04:10, 11 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

illusion?

There is nothing inherently wrong with any orientation in images like these, and there is no "correct" one. The illusion is in the mind of the beholder, and when the perception flips from hole to mountain or vice versa, it is called gestalt. Personally, for all the examples on this page, I see the craters as craters, but as an editor of lunar articles I'm used to this phenomenon. To minimize the occurrence of the illusion in oblique images, the image can be rotated around so that the foreground is at the bottom, or equivalently so that the horizon is at the top. Jstuby (talk) 04:03, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you! This article acting like one was wrong and one was right was making me wonder if something was wrong with my eyes or brain. For Occator, I see the left one as a crater, and the right one as a mountain, but the article says it's the other way around. For Goclenius, I see both as craters. Statalyzer (talk) 21:11, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think there's any sense that these are the four great examples, they're just four that a single editor picked when creating the article in 2015, seemingly restricting themselves to simple and uncropped 90/180 degree rotations of existing images. I see all of them as craters as well, and am in no way used to looking at lunar landscapes.

File:Apollo 8 Photograph of Goclenius Rotated to Create Illusion.jpg definitely undermines itself by having a large crater at the top, giving the sense that it's closer to the viewer and that the moon is curving away into the distance in the bottom right, which would mean that they can't be hills. I've now swapped it out for a new version that's rotated more arbitrarily in order to make the "hills" appear to be horizontal. Belbury (talk) 15:58, 5 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Keep the examples

Why would you WILLINGLY turn an article like this into a stub??? It's not like the examples are clogging up the place, they're the only damn information here. And they're VERY helpful. So yeah IAPETUSOUTSOLD (talk) 16:02, 10 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I very much saw them as clogging the place up, to be honest, but it'd be good to hear other views on it. What help do you see it giving the reader to have a paragraph like

In September 2015, NASA released an image from the space probe Dawn of the crater Occator on dwarf planet Ceres. Because of the position of the Sun at the time the image was taken, the walls of the crater may appear to be convex instead of concave. On the right is the same image rotated 180 degrees to change the position of the shadows and eliminate the illusion.

naming the craters and the date of the photo, for every pair of images? To me that makes this sound like a rare illusion that NASA only encounters occasionally, but obviously it happens all the time. Is it correct that these are just four examples chosen by a Wikipedia editor, rather than significant historical ones? If they're intended to illustrate different aspects of the illusion, only the Tin Bider example is saying that.

If there are cases where NASA misinterpreted an image and later corrected themselves, that would be worth writing about here, but it doesn't seem to be what's being described at the moment.

I think a single strong example like File:Crater illusion.jpg is enough to get the idea across. Belbury (talk) 16:17, 10 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This article is a stub; removing the images just makes that fact more apparent. Each example has less marginal utility than the one before it. I suggest a single example in the lead, with a limited set of other examples in a WP:GALLERY. VQuakr (talk) 19:02, 10 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]