system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why do things that seem big and detailed suddenly turn out to be so small when you take a picture of it? (Ex. Moon, Mountain in the background, etc)
gpt
It depends on the lens on your camera. It also is because of the design of your eye.

Take a picture of a moon with a long telephoto lens, and you will see it as being incredibly detailed and big. But if you use a wide-angle phone camera, it will seem small, because the camera is taking a picture of everything, and the moon is just a small part of everything.

Your eye manages to be both a wide-angle and telephoto camera in one. It has a detailed patch in the middle packed with lots of light sensing cells all individual connected to single nerves, that allow you to see what you are focussing on in fine detail. It also has a large retina filled more sparse cells, with a number of cells driving each single nerve, giving less detailed wide-angle vision.

Lastly, your brain is not just taking pictures like a camera. It is analysing the scene and pulling from it the information you want, by turns extracting the detail from different parts of the scene, and delivering to your consciousness the image it has built up by parts over several seconds.