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Asked by to Naomi, Edward, Ian, Mathew on 24 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Naomi Osborne answered on 24 Jun 2014:
Hi fnebi!
They may look like they’re following you but this is because they’re so far away and very big – where ever you walk you’ll see them because they’re always in your field of vision, making it look like they’re following you!
Hope this makes sense!
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Comments
Ian commented on :
It’s all down to ANGLES.
Imagine driving down a motorway, and looking out the side window of the car. The fence next to the road is moving past you at the same speed as the trees further away, but once metre of fence appear as a much larger ANGLE within your field of vision than one meter of trees, so when the fence moves one metre it looks like its moving faster than the trees. Moving one meter moves the fence further across your field of vision, than one metre of trees.
The effect is called parallax.
It was used in a lot of old video games where the far distant objects were scrolled across the screen slowly, while closer objects were moved more quickly… so they’d look closer!
The sun and the moon are a LONG LONG way away, so you have to move a massive distance to change the angle between you and them. In computer graphics we treat things like sunlight differently from regular “point lights”, and consider that the rays from them are essentially parallel, as no matter how far you move (in most typical cases) you can’ t change the angle.