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.
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
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
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.
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.
No, you morons! That’s your thumb with the close ad X under it.
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 bet it’s hot there.
The side of Mercury we’re seeing in the pic is quite cold
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.
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!
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.
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.
Those are some mercurial tempera…tures
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.
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.
You’re not invited to my birthday party.
Ackchually, that’s just a photography of mercury, not the actual planet on your screen.
username checks out
Okay Magritte
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 😭
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.
Looks like a dead pixel.
The scale of the universe continues to blow my mind.
Prepare that mind for further blowage
This series is great. Thanks so much! I am getting sucked into a black hole of these videos.
Always happy to introduce a new person to Kurzgesagt
And this is why I worship the Sun
But pray to Joe Pesci, right? You pray to Joe Pesci, right?! RIGHT?
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.
The 3:2 resonance Klear references is considered a type of tidal locking.
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.
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…
I’ll have to get 2312, haven’t heard of that one. Same universe?
Adjacent, probably. Very similar, and seems to purposefully be set a hundred years after Blue Mars ends (2212).
But it starts and ends on Mercury after a voyage through the solar system, not spending much story time on Mars.
