Starship Asterisk*

bill.starguy wrote:Which orientation do 99.99999999% of ALL computers use for their monitors? Uh ... Landscape. Then why would any image that doesn't have an obvious Earth horizon be placed on APOD in Portrait? I get it: I can download and rotate on my own, but when I'm asking my students to evaluate or explain or even just appreciate the image on APOD they have to scoll up and down to see the image and the documentation. Screw the smartphones.

In conclusion, if you you want APOD to look like 99% of all submissions on The Weather Channel, then keep up the dumb idea of Portrait orientation. Otherwise, why not make your own job easier and post images in Landscape?

geckzilla wrote:
Wow, I've never met someone quite so passionate about orientation.
Maybe we should only present square aspect ratios and be done with it.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201502/what-makes-you-look-fat-vertical-or-horizontal-lines wrote:
What Makes You Look Fat: Vertical or Horizontal Lines?
Wearing the pinstriped suit masquerades a few extra pounds, right? Oh no.
by Berit Brogaard D.M.Sci., Ph.D, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog
The Superhuman Mind : Feb 13, 2015

[b][color=#0000FF]The 3-D Helmholtz Square illusion: reasons to wear horizontal stripes, Source: Peter Thompson and Kyriaki Mikellidou, Journal of Vision, August 5, 2009 vol. 9 no. 8 article 50.[/color][/b]

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<<It’s a common belief that if you want to appear slimmer than you actually are, you should wear clothes with vertical stripes. The classical pinstriped business suit would be an example of this sort of clothing masquerading a few extra pounds. It turns out that this folk belief is fundamentally wrong. A square composed of horizontal lines appears taller and narrower than an identical square made up of vertical lines.

This illusion was discovered by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1925, and is also known as the Helmholtz illusion. Helmholtz’s explanation of the illusion was that a filled out area looks longer than an unfilled area of the same size. His thought was that the figure with horizontal stripes looks filled and hence longer from bottom up, whereas the square with vertical lines looks filled and hence longer from left to right. This then generates the illusion that the square with horizontal lines is taller and slimmer than the same-sized square with vertical stripes, which looks short and fat.

In 2009 British psychologists Peter Thompson and Kyriaki Mikellidou followed up with similar studies using three-dimensional female models. And lo and behold! The illusion persisted. When two people are the same size, a person wearing a horizontal-striped dress appears to be the thinner of the two. In order for the them to appear to be the same size, the person wearing the horizontal stripes would have to be six percent wider than the person dressed in vertically-striped clothing.>>

• Helmholtz illusion makes you look fit only when you are already fit, but not for everyone.

Chris Peterson wrote:

bill.starguy wrote:Which orientation do 99.99999999% of ALL computers use for their monitors? Uh ... Landscape. Then why would any image that doesn't have an obvious Earth horizon be placed on APOD in Portrait? I get it: I can download and rotate on my own, but when I'm asking my students to evaluate or explain or even just appreciate the image on APOD they have to scoll up and down to see the image and the documentation. Screw the smartphones.

In conclusion, if you you want APOD to look like 99% of all submissions on The Weather Channel, then keep up the dumb idea of Portrait orientation. Otherwise, why not make your own job easier and post images in Landscape?

The appropriate orientation is the one that the imager considers most suitable for his target, not the one dictated by the output device. Even so, it's worth considering that you are too quick in discounting those smartphones. Probably the majority of APOD viewers are now using phones or tablets, not PCs, and therefore, a portrait format should be assumed for the default viewer.

For most deep sky images, the best orientation is the astronomical standard- north up/east left. In that case, the orientation will be determined by the shape of the target, and will be neither an aesthetic choice nor one determined by assumptions about the output device.

geckzilla wrote:I had a monitor that would rotate once and I tried using it like that just to see how it was, but for some reason it hurt my neck. It was oddly uncomfortable.