system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is it that when I look at the moon with my naked eye it's huge, but when I take a picture of it with my digital camera it's a tiny dot?
gpt
There are two reasons for what you described.

The reason the moon can look so big to your eyes is that it is usually low on the horizon when you notice it and there is some far off building/trees/skyline that gives your brain a reference for size. The image on your retina is exactly the same but your brain sees it as "bigger" because it now has a way to measure it against something familiar. If you look at the moon when it is straight overhead it is the same size but will look very small in the open sky (unless a plane goes in front of it).

The reason the moon looks small in photos has to do with the angle of view given by the lens. A "wide" lens has a short focal length, giving you ~60 degrees of the sky visible. The moon however only takes up 1/2 of a degree of the sky, with a 60 degree view the moon takes up 1/120th of the width of your picture and there is no fooling your brain into making it look bigger. To take a picture where the moon looks big you need a lens that has a very small angle of view, only a few ones of degrees, but those lenses tend to be very expensive, a few thousands of dollars. A lens with a 2.5 degree angle of view will make the moon cover 1/5th of the width of the photo, quite a bit bigger than the 1/120th of a normal angle of view.