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.
Ackchually, that's just a photography of mercury, not the actual planet on your screen.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Looks like a dead pixel.
The scale of the universe continues to blow my mind.
I'm sorry but my socks are still on. 100% wool.
Well, my socks are off.
....so are my pants
and underwear
and shirt
This reminds me of that part of that space opera I read where there was a nomadic colony on mercury which needed to always be moving at exactly the right speed to stay on the dark side of the terminator.
Wow. I was in middle school and had to do a creative writing assignment, and I wrote a science fiction short story set in a colony on that boundary of Mercury. I thought Mercury was tidal locked. I was praised for my creativity.
I was today years old when I found that Mercury is not tidal locked.
Same here. I was so going to ackchyually that guy, but I did a quick check before and turns out there is a day/night cycle.
Apparently one Mercury day takes exactly two Mercury years due to some fuckery involving "3:2 spin-orbit resonance" which is something I'm too drunk to comprehend right now.
Gonna be an interesting wikipedia binge at work tomorrow tho
That was in the Red / Green / Blue mars trilogy, one of my favorites. Though I think I've seen the concept in other works as well.
Basically the temp difference between day / night caused contraction of the rail tracks, pushing the whole city forward so it was always just ahead of dawn.
I guess because of perspective, Mercury being millions of miles closer to the camera than it is to the sun, the actual proportions would have the planet being much smaller by comparison
Mercury's apparent size in the sky when close to us is about twice the size as when mercury is in the other side of the sun from us. So mercury would appear about 75% the size it is in this photo of it were next to the sun (so about the same distance away as the sun is).
Trying to wrap my head around how incromprehensively large even just our sun is always makes me feel dizzy.
We are not even a pale blue dot to most of the universe, and when we disappear nothing will know or remember us.
My fav sun fact is that it burns 400 million tons of hydrogen each second, and will be doing that for billions of years. That's 400 million tons of the lightest possible element there is. Just absolutely insane how gigantic the mass of the sun is.
My fav is just that the sun is, all by itself, 99% of the total mass of our solar system. Most of the rest of that 1% is Jupiter.
You're understating it a bit there - the sun is 99.86% of the mass of the solar system by itself. To the nearest whole percent, the solar system consists of 100% "the sun". To the nearest 0.1%, it's 99.9% the sun and 0.1% Jupiter.
No, you morons! That's your thumb with the close ad X under it.
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.
Science Journalists; Neil Degrasse Tyson claims dead pixels may actually be Mercury sized planets!
How is the next transit of Venus not until 2117? That blows my socks’ mind. Seems like that should be happening very regularly.
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