To paraphrase the caption above, this is very definitely a scene you will never get to see in person — not on planet earth, anyway — because it's physically impossible for the moon to appear so much larger than the sun when they are seen together with the naked eye. Why? Because, given their relative distances from the earth, the moon and the sun subtend the same angle in the sky, which is a fancy astrophysical way of saying that from our earthly vantage point they should always appear to be of equal size.

Granted, there is a famous optical illusion by virtue of which either heavenly body may seem somewhat larger than usual when it appears close to the horizon, but that is obviously not the...

To paraphrase the caption above, this is very definitely a scene you will never get to see in person — not on planet earth, anyway — because it's physically impossible for the moon to appear so much larger than the sun when they are seen together with the naked eye. Why? Because, given their relative distances from the earth, the moon and the sun subtend the same angle in the sky, which is a fancy astrophysical way of saying that from our earthly vantage point they should always appear to be of equal size.

Granted, there is a famous optical illusion by virtue of which either heavenly body may seem somewhat larger than usual when it appears close to the horizon, but that is obviously not the explanation for the disparity seen here. We can only conclude that this is a computer-generated image or photo-realistic painting of an imaginary landscape, not an actual photograph.

The folks at Snopes.com have traced its likely origin to a German artist named Inga Nielsen, who apparently created it using Terragen, a program for generating background scenery for games, etc.