How big does Earth look from the Moon?

About four times wider than the Sun, and not always the same — the Moon’s orbit is an ellipse. Computed: Earth at its nearest and its farthest within one year.

Sit about 71 cm from your screen — arm’s length at a desk — and the Earth beside this line is the size it looks from the Moon. It is drawn 87 CSS pixels wide, and a CSS pixel is defined as an angle rather than a length, so on a phone held where you normally hold it, it comes out close to right as well.

A lunar plain in sunlight with Earth hanging above the horizon behind it. — Mare Marginis, on the eastern limb, where Earth sits 9.1° above the horizon instead of nearly overhead. Earth is 1.85° wide here — put a thumb up at arm’s length and it would not cover it.

Earth spans about 1.85° of sky from the Moon, against the Sun’s 0.54°. That makes it roughly 3.5× the Sun’s width — and something like thirteen times the width of the Moon as we see it from a back garden.

Hold your thumb out at arm’s length. That covers the Moon from here with room to spare. It would not cover Earth from there.

It is not always the same size

The Moon’s orbit is an ellipse, not a circle, so the distance changes through the month. Within one year of samples the engine finds Earth as large as 2.05° at 356895 km away, and as small as 1.80° at 406599 km.

That is a swing of 13.93% between nearest and farthest, and the last figure on this page puts both in one frame at one magnification so the difference is the difference you can see. It is the same effect that gives Earth its supermoons, seen from the other end.

Why it looks bigger than it should

Photographs from the Apollo missions often disappoint people: Earth looks small. That is a lens problem, not an astronomy problem. A camera flattens a wide field onto a small rectangle. 1.85° is genuinely large — about four Sun-widths of sky — and standing there, the thing that would strike you is not its size but that it never moves.

The first figure on this page is the honest version of that: a wide view from Mare Marginis, where Earth sits 9.1° above the horizon rather than overhead, and the ground gives you something to measure it against. It looks modest, and it is still nearly four times the width of the Sun.

Earth and the Sun side by side at the same magnification, Earth several times the wider of the two. — Two directions at one instant, rendered at one field of view: Earth 1.85° across, the Sun 0.54°, a ratio of 3.5×. They are in separate panels because they are never in the same part of the sky — Earth’s phase IS its angle from the Sun, so a full Earth puts the Sun behind you by definition. The Sun’s glare is turned down here; nothing else is.

Earth at its nearest and its farthest within one year, at the same magnification, the nearer one noticeably larger. — The nearest and farthest Earth of a twelve-month span, both at full phase and both at one field of view, so the difference you can see is the whole difference: 13.93%. Picking the two dates on distance alone is not enough — the first version of this figure found a near Earth that happened to be new and a far one that happened to be full, and compared phases while claiming to compare sizes.

How these numbers were produced

Every figure on this page came out of the ephemeris that runs inside Lunar Aspect, computed for Mare Marginis at 2026-10-12 10:00 UTC. Nothing here was typed in by hand: the page is generated, and a number that the engine stops producing breaks the build rather than going quietly stale.

Value	Produced by
1.85°	`compute().earth.angRad × 2`
0.54°	`compute().sun.angRad × 2`
3.5×	`ratio of the two above`
9.1° above the horizon	`compute().earth.alt`
2.05°	`largest earth.angRad in a year of samples`
1.80°	`smallest earth.angRad in a year of samples`
356895 km	`compute().earth.dist at that instant`
406599 km	`compute().earth.dist at that instant`
13.93%	`nearest ÷ farthest angular diameter`
87	`earth.angRad × 2 ÷ the CSS reference pixel (1/96 in at 28 in, W3C CSS Values)`
71 cm	`the CSS reference viewing distance, 28 in (W3C CSS Values)`

Engine build 596b875 2026-09-23 · page generated 2026-09-23 · positions are apparent, referred to the observing site rather than to the Moon’s centre.

Move the date yourself

This page is one frozen moment. The engine that computed it runs on a phone, at any date, from anywhere on the Moon — the eclipses, the planets, the comets and Earth’s phase, all of it computed rather than canned.

Lunar Aspect — free on the App Store Or open it in this browser