From that picture, it looks like you’d be on mercury and look up, see nothing but sun, But realistically it’s 60% closer than earth
looks kinda like this from the surface
Im struggling to parse this. The picture of the sun with the tiny dot when compared with the artists impression you posted. It just wont click together. How can the sun appear so big from the telescope compared to mercury but be so small from mercury’s perspective?
Edit. Actually i think it clicked. Mercury is so far from us and so smalkl that it appears like a small dot through that telescope even when zoomed in enough to see the sun that closley. Its actually still really far from the sun but our perspective and that flat picture makes it seem like its about to be consumed by the sun. If it was off to the side the distance would be more clear.
So more like this
S—‐-------------------------------M--------------------------------------V----------------------------------E
Than
S—M‐---------------------------------------------------------------------V----------------------------------E
Yep, zoom and narrow aperture really messes with perspective.
It’s kind of opposite of the tilt shift photos that make real life things look fake.
If someone is struggling with it still, think about the moon.
On the surface of the moon, the sun looks basically like from the earth, small disk in the sky.
From
lunarsolar eclipses we know that just from 300.000km away (on earth) the moon looks just as big as the sun.Now imagine you travel just a couple million km further away, the moon will look smaller and smaller, while the sun stays almost the same (as the distance to the moon will be 10 times bigger and the distance to the sun will increase by like 2%). If you are just 3 million km away from earth the moon will be a small-ish dot in front of the sun (it would cover about 1% of the suns disk, if my math maths out).
For context, the moon and mercury are quite comparable in size.
I’ll tell you what’s definitely unsettling;
The fact that if you kiss a mirror, you’ll only ever kiss yourself on the lips.
No, you morons! That’s your thumb with the close ad X under it.
And this is why I worship the Sun
But pray to Joe Pesci, right? You pray to Joe Pesci, right?! RIGHT?
My favorite fun astronomy fact is that a transit like this (Venus, but still) is how we managed to figure out our distance to the Sun in the 1700s
I bet it’s hot there.
The side of Mercury we’re seeing in the pic is quite cold
So conditioned that NDT is talking bullshit and people dunking on him that I had to read it a couple of times to understand it.
I mean it would but I’ve known the scale of the universe since i still threw myself birthday parties…lol
I tried wiping the dust off my screen 😭
so is basically the whole sky sun on mercury during the day?
Naw, it only looks about three times as big from Mercury. Bake you to death right quick though
This small circle is the sun, absolutely dwarfed by the earth taking up the rest of the frame. Definitely unsettling.
You shouldn’t stare too long at this photo with your naked eye or you’ll go blind.
What if I give my eye undies?
That will express to your eye your undieing love.
But only if they’re clean undies, otherwise it could express conjunctivitis to your eyes.
Puts in perspective how small Mercury is.
it probly only look tiny cause it’s far away
Yeah, the earth is actually a lot bigger than it looks on the photo. The photo is only a few centimeters, but the earth is at least 10x bigger than that!
Ackchually, that’s just a photography of mercury, not the actual planet on your screen.
username checks out
Okay Magritte
Ironically mercury while being the closest planet to the sun, isn’t the hottest planet in the solar system. Venus takes that title because of its atmosphere holding so much co2. Im sure its fine were putting so much of it in our atmosphere.
Yeah I prefer summer to winter so if we get summer and super summer now I would enjoy that until I’m dead and after that, why should I care?
/s just in case.
Finally my investment on Arctic Beachside property will pay off.
The beach is great. The only issue is that on days worth going, lots of other folks will be there.
We heat up the planet by 4 or 5 degrees, it’s gonna get much less crowded. It’ll be like a perfect, permanent vacation.
Too autistic for this. Why would it be unsettling? Mercury is much smaller than the sun. If it was suddenly bigger in proportion to the sun, then I’d be unsettled.
Right, I feel like no astronomer should be unsettled by just a picture of our solar system.
You’re not invited to my birthday party.
It doesn’t exactly unsettle me, but pondering the mind-boggling scale of celestial bodies and the cosmos can certainly be… humbling, I guess?
I had a co-worker a while back who couldn’t talk about the great scale of the universe cause he’d get freaked out. It didn’t come up much, but when it did, he’d be like, “Please stop, it’s stressing me out” so we’d change the subject.
That guy goes to so many birthday parties
Less about size and more about size and relative distance. Think about being on Mercury and the entire sky is blazing sun - and yet it survives.
on Mercury and the entire sky is blazing sun
I’ve never thought about this and holy shit
That’s not the case though. Sure the sun would seem bigger on mercury but it’s not gonna fill the entire sky.
Edit: According to NASA the sun would appear 3 times bigger and 7 times brighter on mercury.
I mean, nothing on Mercury survives. At night it’s -170 degrees Celsius and +430 degrees at day.
There was a time people thought Mercury would have some “twilight” acreage that was always at habitable temperatures. Then we learned that, while yes it is tidally locked with the Sun, it is locked in a 3:2 resonance so it does rotate with respect to the sun, and everywhere gets both scorched and frozen to uninhabitability.
So we just need movable habitats like in Howl’s Moving Castle or Mortal Engines
Those are some mercurial tempera…tures
It’s very hard to convey the size of the sun in a photo. On earth, it isn’t bigger than the moon. I don’t think I’ve ever seen, in a real photo, just how massive the sun is. I absolutely dwarfs a planet, which is kind of chilling. I’ve never seen a photo that shows anything further away from the camera than a planet AND that much bigger.
Mercury is like 30-50 sun’s diameters away from the sun. This perspective makes it look like it’s almost touching.
Size scale matches though
Yeah this perspective is weird. It makes it look like the sun takes up 90% of the sky on mercury. That can’t be right though.
Almost 30 million miles closer to us than the sun is.
The sun is rather large.
