Space In General

Cape Canaveral is only a 5 minute drive from here, so I managed to get a photo of the rocket myself. It's huge!

20160510_121304.jpg
 
That tells you something about the relative sizes of the objects, especially considering that Mercury is not right against the sun, but nearly 40% of the distance from the sun to us!

It made me curious about the apparent size of the sun from Mercury, compared to our view, and it's certainly not something that dominates the sky like this image makes it seem like it would be.
 
wfooshee
That tells you something about the relative sizes of the objects, especially considering that Mercury is not right against the sun, but nearly 40% of the distance from the sun to us!

It made me curious about the apparent size of the sun from Mercury, compared to our view, and it's certainly not something that dominates the sky like this image makes it seem like it would be.
Click to expand...

This Mercury transit was a very graphic display of how incredibly humongous the Sun is compared to our planet -- the Earth wouldn't look much different than the tiny speck of Mercury. And then there are red giant stars like Betelgeuse that don't fit into Earth or even Mars orbit -- so the Sun is much smaller compared to Betelgeuse than Mercury is compared to the Sun. Mind boggling.
 
Ceres, Ahuna Mons with multiple double craters in attendance. ~450'/pixel
Impressive buttresses, aretes, columns or whatever they are. Curious talus or glacis, for want of a better word, at bases of the largest ones.
ceres5a.jpg


Chained craters, center right, lower right
ceres5b.jpg


For laughs
 
Next SpaceX launch/landing Thursday @ 5:40pm EST.

Also, I guess the booster used on that last landing may not be reusable due to landing too hard.
 
wfooshee
That tells you something about the relative sizes of the objects, especially considering that Mercury is not right against the sun, but nearly 40% of the distance from the sun to us!

It made me curious about the apparent size of the sun from Mercury, compared to our view, and it's certainly not something that dominates the sky like this image makes it seem like it would be.
Click to expand...

Here is a comparison image I made in Blender. The left circle is how the sun appears from Earth, the right circle is how the sun appears from Mercury.

sun.png


The diameter of the the appearance from Earth is about 40% of that of the appearance from Mercury.

But since the area of the circle is proportional to the radius squared, the sun appears 6.25 times bigger (and brighter) from Mercury than the from the Earth (if we ignore the fact that some light is absorbed by the atmosphere).
 
IfAndOr
My mind is constantly in a state of bogglement regarding size and distances in space.

Starting with little Mercury and ending with something a bit larger!

View attachment 545449
Click to expand...

By my rough calculations (using measurements taken from that diagram), if you scaled that UY Scuti to be on the same scale as the Earth in panel 1, it'd be about 2,342,780 x 2,342,780 pixels.

My image editing program of choice tops out at 60k x 60k, and that uses 10.06 GB of RAM... so that scaled UY Scuti image would require over 15 TB of RAM.
 
Lain
The numbers are moderately less incomprehensible. :P
Click to expand...

Beg to differ. Yeah, we are exposed to megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes all the time, but they're just labels. The size of the numbers doesn't "ding" anywhere. Gather every Commodore 64 ever produced, then invent some way to link them all together so they could combine and share memory space. They could not hold your 15TB.

OK, let's store the 15TB on disks. We'll start with the ol' 3.5-inch HD floppy. The stack of disks totaling 15TB would be 22 miles high!

Fine, stupid way to store it. Let's do DVD-ROM, dual layer even, for ~9GB per disc. You need about 220 discs, still. So watch 220 feature movies on DVD, plus all the "extras," and since none of those are actually at capacity, you still haven't been through the storage your 15TB represents.

I'm thinking still incomprehensibly large!!! :)
 
wfooshee
I'm thinking still incomprehensibly large!!! :)
Click to expand...
Multiplication and dimensions do mesh together though. So if we think a fourth dimension is, as far as scale goes, comprehensible, then with a (extremity) figure of 1000 we'd have a tool (?) to go as far as 10^12. Or if a more modest 100 is selected, one hundred million.
 
wfooshee
Beg to differ. Yeah, we are exposed to megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes all the time, but they're just labels. The size of the numbers doesn't "ding" anywhere. Gather every Commodore 64 ever produced, then invent some way to link them all together so they could combine and share memory space. They could not hold your 15TB.

OK, let's store the 15TB on disks. We'll start with the ol' 3.5-inch HD floppy. The stack of disks totaling 15TB would be 22 miles high!

Fine, stupid way to store it. Let's do DVD-ROM, dual layer even, for ~9GB per disc. You need about 220 discs, still. So watch 220 feature movies on DVD, plus all the "extras," and since none of those are actually at capacity, you still haven't been through the storage your 15TB represents.

I'm thinking still incomprehensibly large!!! :)
Click to expand...

If they were to "ding" anywhere, that would mean that they were comprehensible.

Slightly less incomprehensible is still incomprehensible. :lol:
 
Actually one million is pretty easy to visualize. Place 125 sheets of graph paper ruled ten lines to the inch on the floor, and you're looking at a million squares. Should fit on your living room floor.
 
BobK
Actually one million is pretty easy to visualize. Place 125 sheets of graph paper ruled ten lines to the inch on the floor, and you're looking at a million squares. Should fit on your living room floor.
Click to expand...
Now do that in 15 million more living room floors, to get his 15 TB number......
 
wfooshee
Now do that in 15 million more living room floors, to get his 15 TB number......
Click to expand...

Actually I was referring to where his 15TB number came from:
Lain
... about 2,342,780 x 2,342,780 pixels.
Click to expand...

"Incomprehensibly large number" is relative anyway; through much of my professional career I've worked with microseconds and nanoseconds and I've actually performed that "million squares" experiment so although I have trouble actually visualizing tera-anything, I can easily get my head around the size scale.

On the the hand, there have been tribes who had no words for larger groups, and whose numbering system would be roughly rendered as "one, two, three, many, many, many..."
 
The images Dotini posted confused me for a while. Fuzz? Plant stalks? What?

They're landslides, ice slides, whatever. My brain tried to make it something microscopic somehow. :)
 
wfooshee
The images Dotini posted confused me for a while. Fuzz? Plant stalks? What?
Click to expand...
Plant stalks on Mars!? That's supposed to be out of the question - until NASA tells us it's okay to think that. They may have the authorization and budget for such a mission within a decade. In the meantime, it's fuzz, or what. :dopey:
 
DAMMIT I COMPLETELY FORGOT THE TIME.

Last time I was able to watch I went outside because the path of the rocket was aimed towards Europe and I was able to see the rocket as a satellite.
 

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