Can someone correct me if I'm wrong -- magnification is nearly 0 because the actual image produced is orders of magnitude smaller than the actual size of the mountain?
lhagaman
Yes, that's right. Arbitrarily large objects will still take up a finite area of the sensor as long as they are placed a sufficiently large distance from the sensor (as they can be since z_0=infinity).
samparadis
This is known as infinity focus! Interestingly, not all photographic lenses are capable of achieving infinity focus, and thus would be unable to focus on far away objects. This same inability to focus at infinity can happen in the human eye: it is called myopia. More parallelisms between lenses and eyes!
See here for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_focus
Can someone correct me if I'm wrong -- magnification is nearly 0 because the actual image produced is orders of magnitude smaller than the actual size of the mountain?
Yes, that's right. Arbitrarily large objects will still take up a finite area of the sensor as long as they are placed a sufficiently large distance from the sensor (as they can be since z_0=infinity).
This is known as infinity focus! Interestingly, not all photographic lenses are capable of achieving infinity focus, and thus would be unable to focus on far away objects. This same inability to focus at infinity can happen in the human eye: it is called myopia. More parallelisms between lenses and eyes!
See here for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_focus