7mo ago

Sun God

98 comments

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?

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.

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.
  
  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
  
  I mean, nothing on Mercury survives. At night it's -170 degrees Celsius and +430 degrees at day.
- 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.
- 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.

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.

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 ~~lunar~~ solar 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.

Looks like a dead pixel.
The scale of the universe continues to blow my mind.
- https://youtu.be/3mnSDifDSxQ
  Prepare that mind for further blowage
  
  This series is great. Thanks so much! I am getting sucked into a black hole of these videos.

I'm sorry but my socks are still on. 100% wool.
- Well, my socks are off.
  ....so are my pants
  and underwear
  and shirt
- Who picks wool for their fucking socks?
  There's nothing sexy about wool.
  EDIT: Fucking. Intercourse. Pun.
  
  Wool socks are the best and I won't be entertaining assertions to the contrary. Wool is temperature regulating, not just super thick and hot, so there are wool socks you can wear in the summer. They also don't hold odor (bacteria) as much.
  
  I think they can be sexy. Also the point of socks isn’t only to be sexy.

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
  
  The 3:2 resonance Klear references is considered a type of tidal locking.
- 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.
  
  The nomadic colony got expanded on in KSR's novel 2312. I don't actually remember much about it in the Mars Trilogy.
  But I've seen the concept before in an old EU Star Wars novel, one of the Solo books maybe, where Lando was operating something similar as his new venture.
  And before that maybe mentioned by Sagan. And before that...
  
  Damn, that's a great idea. I gotta go back and finish that series.

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).
  
  Neat! Thanks!

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.

TIL the sun is dark brown. Crazy the tricks our minds play.
- Fun fact screens can't produce "brown".
  
  My turn to post the Technology Connections link

Praise the Sun! \0/
- Bring forth the shears of stumping!

Proof that light is a particle and not a wave?
- Yes, but also both. (a simple example follows)
  Think of it like you being at work or home. If I check your house, either you're there, or you aren't. If you're there, you're at home, simple. If not at home, you're at work.
  Same with your work: either you're there when I check - or you aren't, therefore at home.
  But before I check either location (it's understood that you are only in 1 of those 2 places), you are effectively in both places, and neither place, all at once.
  
  And if I work from home?
- What if all particles are waves. They just temporarily form loops that we consider to have particle behaviour when observed on a larger scale.
  
  Great, Brian Greene's been drinking again.

Science Journalists; Neil Degrasse Tyson claims dead pixels may actually be Mercury sized planets!

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.

And this is why I worship the Sun
- But pray to Joe Pesci, right? You pray to Joe Pesci, right?! RIGHT?

Praise the sun!

My socks were appropriately blown off but I still didn't get invited.

I bet it's hot there.
- The side of Mercury we're seeing in the pic is quite cold

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

How is the next transit of Venus not until 2117? That blows my socks’ mind. Seems like that should be happening very regularly.
- Same reasons for any eclipses :
  .1- plane of orbits (the one for Venus and the one for the Earth) do not exactly coincide and
  .2- because distances between objects are much larger than objects, including size of the sun.
  
  I believe you. Still seems wild that I will never see another one in my lifetime.
- It's probably more about how often it's visible in your part of the world than it happening at all if I had to guess.

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

Imagine what the sun would look like standing on Mercury.

The morning of my birthday party I hung out with my physics teacher (it was a Holiday from high school) who's also an astronomer and we watched mercy transit the sun.

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
- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-the-sun-looks-like-from-other-planets_n_577ec142e4b0344d514e9182

98 comments