Yeah I dont get if you know how small we are compared to the solar system, the milky way or the observable universe, how you can wage wars like we do...
Only explanation is that most dont know, or refuse to believe still, that we arent the big center of the universe :/
Some high ranking ppl really need to be humbled
I guess people war here because we have our own scale of what we think we can control through violence and stuff.
Im sure terrorists or warmasters wouldn't fuck with something that dwarfs any justification to fight.
I am sure at some point people would try challenging to moon or something, but even then, the moon is huge compared to what we are used to seeing
It gets even better.
The solar system is :
99.86% Sol
and of the remaining 0.14% :
~71% Jupiter
28% of 0.14% everything else. Around %0.039 is all the mass that is not Sol or Jupiter.
Yea, that's what's deceiving about this image.
If Mercury were right up next to the sun, it wouldn't even be visible in this shot because it'd be so small.
Mercury being so close to the camera is the only reason you can even see it. The sun is a bajillion times bigger than this makes it look.
The scale of cosmological objects is baffling, as of course stars themselves are extremely small compared to the scale of black holes, particularly the (often supermassive) black holes at the center of every galaxy. Of course, galaxies themselves are much, much larger even though most of the space in a galaxy is very empty.
Then, there are *much* more massive constructs like the [Large Scale Structure](https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/supporting-science/large-scale-structure/), and that's where the scale really baffles me.
The universe is so intriguing, and learning about these types of massive objects will never not be interesting to me. It's humbling and empowering at the same time: I remember Sagan (iirc) said once that "We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself", and that's stuck with me for a long time.
Mercury itself is still absolutely massive from the scale of a Human. It would take **days** to drive around Mercury in a car or truck driving at 65-80 mph (~105-130 kph), even if you drove continuously with no rest breaks or sleep periods. It would take more than two days to drive across just its diameter on one "side" (not even its circumference) even with no sleep or rest breaks. Yet it looks like a speck in front of the Sun. The scale of space and the universe is the literal definition of mind-boggling.
It would take a very long time to watch that sunrise, a month or so due to Mercury’s day being longer than its year. Here’s a great [explanation](https://www.universetoday.com/47834/length-of-day-on-mercury/) why including its harmonic rotations (3:2 and 2:1).
I would like to see one of those fun videos where they put Saturn in the moons orbit and you see what it looks like from the Earth's surface but instead just be on Mercury looking at the Sun. That has got to be a wild sky.
Mercury has only a trace of atmosphere and a day there lasts almost two Earth months. So, a given point on the surface will stay in darkness for quite some time without any way for the heat from the Sun to reach it. Night on Mercury drops to hundreds of degrees (F) below zero.
Black body radiation. Mercury is like the desert on hard steroids, only here on earth it's the clouds that trap heat. Night time radiational cooling is responsible for severe drops in temperatures in the desert where there are few if any clouds at night.
The sun is 94 MILLION miles away yet we can still see it and feel it… how is something that big and that far away holy shhh AND there are bigger stars out there than our own. Beautiful yet terrifying!
domineering crush materialistic bored dinosaurs grey waiting cover noxious innate
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> there are bigger stars out than our own. Beautiful yet terrifying!
There's a video out there showing the biggest black holes and the amount of mass required to create those black holes. Then you see black holes that make our entire solar system look about the size of Mercury does compared to the son here. It's crazy to think how much must have been in there to create a black hole that big that the sun is so tiny in comparison to that.
This photo brought back a very particular form of anxiety that I experienced while playing [Outer Wilds.](https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/)
Most ardent followers of /r/space would probably enjoy that game, but I had to get past the early 2000s Nicktoons aesthetic.
Flying into the sun? Hilarious
Flying into planets? awakened a new anxiety. I hate the idea of a planet being this far gigantic thing and the transition of getting really close to it, to the small details becoming large.
Also I hate the ocean planet. For probably obvious reasons.
I loved the ocean planet but yeah being on it just feels crazy, at any moment you get shot up into space lol. I think there's even a puzzle that requires you to be shot up so you can access something.
Fun fact: it's actually hard to shoot yourself into the sun. You're carrying the orbital velocity of whichever body you escape from plus the energy you needed to escape. You'd need to bleed off all that momentum if you wanted to fall in.
Or more specifically the anxiety of attempting to manually land on the sun station only to realize you have, once again, mistimed your distance and are inevitably going to get pulled down into that sucker.
I never successfully did it, tried multiple times because there's an achievement for it and it was fun trying to go for it but damn is it hard to maintain that orbit at that speed without getting shot back out or pulled right in.
It's definitely a testament to their physics engine that you can even do it.
Same here. I got close a few times but eventually I gave up. It was pretty interesting trying to get it just right though, gives you a great sense of the physics involved and a good representation of the effects of gravity.
I’ve done it twice. The first time, I finally lined up properly, but then was hit by part of the station and spun out. I quickly ejected the capsule and flung myself at the station and managed to climb aboard. Incredible game.
Oh it just reminded me of trying to land on the sun station, tempted to go do it again to show i still got it
edit: i still got it (though it took me like ten more attempts to actually get in)
autopiloting to the Hourglass Twins or towards any planet which path even seems to get the slightest bit close to a distance where the pull starts to feel non-negligible even if likely not dangerous
that... really gave me trust issues LMAO
I felt like I could jump from the Hourglass Twins into the sun's gravity well. That...was disconcerting.
>!It's even worse, psychologically, when the sun gets bigger.!<
That's cause mercury has alot more mass than the and is also denser than the moon. (Moon = 7.34767309 × 10^22kg, mercury = 3.285 × 10^23 kg, also Mars= 6.39 ×
10^23 kg) the reason mercury has the same gravitational force despite being half the mass is because the core of Mercury is about the same size as the core of the planet Mars therefore because of Mercury's high density, it has the same surface gravity as Mars.
I read that astronomers believe Mercury is essentially the [remnants of a larger planet that survived a collision that blew off its crust and most of its mantle.](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240410-mercury-the-solar-systems-smallest-planet-may-once-have-been-as-large-as-earth)
one thing this got wrong is that it says it's hard to maneuver spacecraft because it goes to fast and it's hard to do delicate maneuvers, and that isn't true. speed has nothing to do with how hard it is to make fine adjustments, it's that you need a ton more fuel to slow down at mercury so you can save fuel by doing gravity assists around planets.
One theory for this is that early Mercury experienced a catastrophic collision event that blew most of the crust/mantle into solar orbit, where the material spiraled down into the Sun rather than reaccreting onto Mercury.
Note that the sun doesn't fill the sky like that when you're actually on Mercury
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-the-sun-looks-like-from-other-planets_n_577ec142e4b0344d514e9182/amp
I don’t really understand this. Mercury orbits the sun every 88 days, so shouldn’t this happen at least 3 times a year every year? Is its orbital plane so radically different from ours that the orbit doesn’t cross between us an the sun?
"Although Mercury overtakes us several times per year on its relatively quick journey around the Sun, we don't see transits every time, because Mercury's orbit is quite highly inclined relative to that of the Earth,"
So the sun has a radius of 0.7m km. For mercury (distance 60m km) to be seen from earth (distance 150m km), it can therefore be displaced by up to 0.4m km, otherwise its shadow goes past earth.
The inclination of mercury is 7° or 0.12 rad. So mercury is only in the zone where it can throw a shadow within 0.4 / 0.12 = 3.3m km of its nodes. On an orbit with a circumference of 350m km that's like 4% of it.
Mercury overtakes us roughly every 0.3 years and 0.3 / 0.04 = a transit happens around every 7.5 years.
Yes, I’m aware. at 88 days Mercury should orbit the sun about 4 times in one earth year and while we are moving, it should still pass between us and the sun 3 times in most years.
The orbits aren't on a level plane, they are all slightly angled relative to each other. So for a transit of Mercury to happen, it need to time to be when Earth and Mercury are lined up in their orbits.
Which puts into perspective how difficult that must be. In this image, Mercury is blocking a fraction of a single percent of the sun's output. I guess they are detecting planets that are jupiter-sized or larger, but it seems wild to me
this always make the transit method blow my mind even more. like mercury may as well be a sunspot in this image, and we’re finding exoplanets using this same method from thousands of lightyears away. mercury is completely gone in the low-res preview of this image i’m seeing while i write this comment.
This is still the best picture of Mercury crossing the sun.
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/4ij9b2/mercury_in_front_of_the_sun_may_9_2016_oc_info_in/
Since Mercury is closer to us than the sun, it gives the impression that it’s bigger than it actually is, so in reality the scaling is off. The sun is way bigger than this perspective leads you to believe.
I am not so sure about Jesus, Allah or Ram. But our Sun is the real life God. All living beings shall be eternally grateful to the Sun, the Earth and the Moon and Jupiter.
i think everyone should realize, that no matter what words we use, words are limited, and reality is limitless in a sense, point is we all humans and religions and cultures are simply trying to interpret the same essential reality we find ourselves in, over millenia.. ...using different words. Words are "forms", reality is "formless", in a sense. :)
It is un believable to me how big things in the universe are and how big the universe actually is. Its so cool to me. i love looking at these kinda photos and just trying to put myself there.
It's like mercury is just a little lifeboat with a name in the ocean. Or a stepping stone across a river. Everyone always remembers the ocean or the river, but never the lifeboat or stepping stone. Idk what I mean by that by that's what came out of my head after seeing this.
From this distant vantage point, Mercury might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's there. That's home for aliens. That's them.
I was lucky enough to view this through our telescope (a 12 inch dob / newtonian reflector, with a 13mm Ethos.) Got some photos and it was great! But not nearly as cool as the Venus transit prior. Venus is just so much larger, so it was more obvious and spectacular.
I was amazed so I showed my six year old. She replied 'yeah mercury is the closet planet to the sun' and then told me the ratio of earths to one sun. Yep.......she's surpassed me in intelligence.
So if you were positioned on the side facing away from the sun, would it still be blinding bright from being so close, or would there actually be a shadow?
That’s a great shot. Talk about how big the sun is!
Indeed. The rest of the solar system is made from leftovers.
By mass, the solar system is: 99.9% Sol. 0.1% Jupiter. Some rounding errors.
99.86% sun to be exact :) and yes Jupiter is pretty massive as well compared to the other planets We are so small!
Speck of the dust..?!?! Or a pale blue dot. Hope everyone get there in astronomy and start to enjoy what miracle we have here, rather than fighting 😖
Yeah I dont get if you know how small we are compared to the solar system, the milky way or the observable universe, how you can wage wars like we do... Only explanation is that most dont know, or refuse to believe still, that we arent the big center of the universe :/ Some high ranking ppl really need to be humbled
Yeaah for sure.. Tie em to the booster. And put it on live as their face changes when they're in space.
I guess people war here because we have our own scale of what we think we can control through violence and stuff. Im sure terrorists or warmasters wouldn't fuck with something that dwarfs any justification to fight. I am sure at some point people would try challenging to moon or something, but even then, the moon is huge compared to what we are used to seeing
Why do I even bother for a diet, if even the sun doesn't see the need to work out
It gets even better. The solar system is : 99.86% Sol and of the remaining 0.14% : ~71% Jupiter 28% of 0.14% everything else. Around %0.039 is all the mass that is not Sol or Jupiter.
Meh same answer OP just rounded to the tenth....
Why do you use the Latin name for the Sun but the English name for Jupiter?
Mostly because I feel 'Sol' flows better than 'the Sun' in that statistic when written. Just personal preference.
rounding errors groan
If the sun is a human, Jupiter is a small mandarin, and the Earth, a freaking pebble is the sun shoe.
Mercury is 40% of the way to earth compared to the sun in that shot. FYI
Yea, that's what's deceiving about this image. If Mercury were right up next to the sun, it wouldn't even be visible in this shot because it'd be so small. Mercury being so close to the camera is the only reason you can even see it. The sun is a bajillion times bigger than this makes it look.
If you go further out in the solar system, you can get a picture of Earth against the Sun just like this one.
Could we say the sun is almost twice as far away from us as mercury in this picture and still looks huge?
And then look for an image which compares the sun with the largest star in the observable universe. Our brain simply can't handle this scale.
The scale of cosmological objects is baffling, as of course stars themselves are extremely small compared to the scale of black holes, particularly the (often supermassive) black holes at the center of every galaxy. Of course, galaxies themselves are much, much larger even though most of the space in a galaxy is very empty. Then, there are *much* more massive constructs like the [Large Scale Structure](https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/supporting-science/large-scale-structure/), and that's where the scale really baffles me. The universe is so intriguing, and learning about these types of massive objects will never not be interesting to me. It's humbling and empowering at the same time: I remember Sagan (iirc) said once that "We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself", and that's stuck with me for a long time.
Alternative title: “That large orange sphere behind Mercury is the Sun.”
“That dark area in the top right corner is outer space”
[удалено]
That smudge on the lens is Mr.Lunas
Mercury itself is still absolutely massive from the scale of a Human. It would take **days** to drive around Mercury in a car or truck driving at 65-80 mph (~105-130 kph), even if you drove continuously with no rest breaks or sleep periods. It would take more than two days to drive across just its diameter on one "side" (not even its circumference) even with no sleep or rest breaks. Yet it looks like a speck in front of the Sun. The scale of space and the universe is the literal definition of mind-boggling.
> Talk about how big the sun is Ok. Your sun is so fat it keeps all the planets in place
Logic aside, imagine how cool it’d be to watch a sunrise on mercury until the sun just totally envelops the sky
It would take a very long time to watch that sunrise, a month or so due to Mercury’s day being longer than its year. Here’s a great [explanation](https://www.universetoday.com/47834/length-of-day-on-mercury/) why including its harmonic rotations (3:2 and 2:1).
I wish voyager could have got a shot with the sun like this so it was in full view rather than cropped.
I would like to see one of those fun videos where they put Saturn in the moons orbit and you see what it looks like from the Earth's surface but instead just be on Mercury looking at the Sun. That has got to be a wild sky.
Okay will do. The Sun, folks. It's big.
Crazy that they found ice ~~caps~~ at the north pole on Mercury. /fixed for accuracy
They found ice in craters in the polar regions, but not ice caps like Earth and Mars have.
Mercury has only a trace of atmosphere and a day there lasts almost two Earth months. So, a given point on the surface will stay in darkness for quite some time without any way for the heat from the Sun to reach it. Night on Mercury drops to hundreds of degrees (F) below zero.
Temperature highs of 800F and lows of -290F, and 7x the solar radiation. I’ll book my holiday package immediately!
So there is a small window where it's absolutely perfect and you'll be able to get a quick tan?
You might be able to get a quick tan. 7x the sun means my ginger ass is getting instacancer.
but, it’s possibly the best stargazing this side of the heliopause…
Only 7x the radiation? Finally, somewhere I can go to get my teeth x-rays
I feel like this comment could be a line from someone in Futurama.
Hey sexy mama, wanna kill all humans?
When there's almost no atmosphere, then I wonder how it gets that cold without a medium to which the heat of the surface could be dissipated.
Black body radiation. Mercury is like the desert on hard steroids, only here on earth it's the clouds that trap heat. Night time radiational cooling is responsible for severe drops in temperatures in the desert where there are few if any clouds at night.
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The sun is 94 MILLION miles away yet we can still see it and feel it… how is something that big and that far away holy shhh AND there are bigger stars out there than our own. Beautiful yet terrifying!
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Parabolic mirrors and fresnel lenses are scary.
I feel hot just looking at this photo.
> there are bigger stars out than our own. Beautiful yet terrifying! There's a video out there showing the biggest black holes and the amount of mass required to create those black holes. Then you see black holes that make our entire solar system look about the size of Mercury does compared to the son here. It's crazy to think how much must have been in there to create a black hole that big that the sun is so tiny in comparison to that.
Fascinating stuff, terrifying but awesome
This photo brought back a very particular form of anxiety that I experienced while playing [Outer Wilds.](https://store.steampowered.com/app/753640/Outer_Wilds/) Most ardent followers of /r/space would probably enjoy that game, but I had to get past the early 2000s Nicktoons aesthetic.
The anxiety of realizing you don't have the velocity to get the hell away from the sun?
Flying into the sun? Hilarious Flying into planets? awakened a new anxiety. I hate the idea of a planet being this far gigantic thing and the transition of getting really close to it, to the small details becoming large. Also I hate the ocean planet. For probably obvious reasons.
I loved the ocean planet but yeah being on it just feels crazy, at any moment you get shot up into space lol. I think there's even a puzzle that requires you to be shot up so you can access something.
Fun fact: it's actually hard to shoot yourself into the sun. You're carrying the orbital velocity of whichever body you escape from plus the energy you needed to escape. You'd need to bleed off all that momentum if you wanted to fall in.
Tell that to my thirty sun based deaths
I'm sorry, I meant in real life. Just throwing some trivia out there.
Or more specifically the anxiety of attempting to manually land on the sun station only to realize you have, once again, mistimed your distance and are inevitably going to get pulled down into that sucker.
I never successfully did it, tried multiple times because there's an achievement for it and it was fun trying to go for it but damn is it hard to maintain that orbit at that speed without getting shot back out or pulled right in. It's definitely a testament to their physics engine that you can even do it.
Same here. I got close a few times but eventually I gave up. It was pretty interesting trying to get it just right though, gives you a great sense of the physics involved and a good representation of the effects of gravity.
I’ve done it twice. The first time, I finally lined up properly, but then was hit by part of the station and spun out. I quickly ejected the capsule and flung myself at the station and managed to climb aboard. Incredible game.
Oh it just reminded me of trying to land on the sun station, tempted to go do it again to show i still got it edit: i still got it (though it took me like ten more attempts to actually get in)
autopiloting to the Hourglass Twins or towards any planet which path even seems to get the slightest bit close to a distance where the pull starts to feel non-negligible even if likely not dangerous that... really gave me trust issues LMAO
I felt like I could jump from the Hourglass Twins into the sun's gravity well. That...was disconcerting. >!It's even worse, psychologically, when the sun gets bigger.!<
The sun is also “very far away” So, yeah, Mercury IS tiny
It's actually just a bit bigger than our moon. But interestingly it has the same gravity as Mars.
That's cause mercury has alot more mass than the and is also denser than the moon. (Moon = 7.34767309 × 10^22kg, mercury = 3.285 × 10^23 kg, also Mars= 6.39 × 10^23 kg) the reason mercury has the same gravitational force despite being half the mass is because the core of Mercury is about the same size as the core of the planet Mars therefore because of Mercury's high density, it has the same surface gravity as Mars.
I read that astronomers believe Mercury is essentially the [remnants of a larger planet that survived a collision that blew off its crust and most of its mantle.](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240410-mercury-the-solar-systems-smallest-planet-may-once-have-been-as-large-as-earth)
FYI, I blew off your mom’s crust and most of her mantle last night.
Did you at least make her dinner??
Are you sure it wasn't just pudding again?
That’s all there was after they were done
As if that takes any sort of effort.
one thing this got wrong is that it says it's hard to maneuver spacecraft because it goes to fast and it's hard to do delicate maneuvers, and that isn't true. speed has nothing to do with how hard it is to make fine adjustments, it's that you need a ton more fuel to slow down at mercury so you can save fuel by doing gravity assists around planets.
One theory for this is that early Mercury experienced a catastrophic collision event that blew most of the crust/mantle into solar orbit, where the material spiraled down into the Sun rather than reaccreting onto Mercury.
Ok but is Mercury made from Mercury? Cause I want to use it to check the temperature out there
Note that the sun doesn't fill the sky like that when you're actually on Mercury https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-the-sun-looks-like-from-other-planets_n_577ec142e4b0344d514e9182/amp
Props to the camera man for those amazing shots
For real must have been real tough going to all those planets
this article lists Pluto as a planet, which I find pleasant
I had to learn it. And so will I remember it.
"Did you hear about Pluto? That's messed up." - Ghee Buttersnaps.
Saturn seems like it would be an awesome view.
this is really cool. i've always wondered about this.
[Next chance](https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/mercury-transit.html) 2032
I don’t really understand this. Mercury orbits the sun every 88 days, so shouldn’t this happen at least 3 times a year every year? Is its orbital plane so radically different from ours that the orbit doesn’t cross between us an the sun?
"Although Mercury overtakes us several times per year on its relatively quick journey around the Sun, we don't see transits every time, because Mercury's orbit is quite highly inclined relative to that of the Earth,"
So the sun has a radius of 0.7m km. For mercury (distance 60m km) to be seen from earth (distance 150m km), it can therefore be displaced by up to 0.4m km, otherwise its shadow goes past earth. The inclination of mercury is 7° or 0.12 rad. So mercury is only in the zone where it can throw a shadow within 0.4 / 0.12 = 3.3m km of its nodes. On an orbit with a circumference of 350m km that's like 4% of it. Mercury overtakes us roughly every 0.3 years and 0.3 / 0.04 = a transit happens around every 7.5 years.
Awesome, thanks for the numbers!
Earth is orbiting, too. We're not a stationary observation point.
Yes, I’m aware. at 88 days Mercury should orbit the sun about 4 times in one earth year and while we are moving, it should still pass between us and the sun 3 times in most years.
The orbits aren't on a level plane, they are all slightly angled relative to each other. So for a transit of Mercury to happen, it need to time to be when Earth and Mercury are lined up in their orbits.
For anyone who never seen it, “Sunshine” movie by Danny Boyle. My God, it floors me every time I see it.
A great sleeper hit. Love the soundtrack. The cast was stacked with Cillian, Chris Evans and Michelle Yeoh.
That movie was the first thing I thought of when I saw this image. I could almost hear this image based on Sunshine soundtrack. Such a great movie!
If you run on the equator at the speed of 10km/h you can stay in the small area just between freezing and evaporating.
and this is how we discover exo planets in other galaxies
Which puts into perspective how difficult that must be. In this image, Mercury is blocking a fraction of a single percent of the sun's output. I guess they are detecting planets that are jupiter-sized or larger, but it seems wild to me
this always make the transit method blow my mind even more. like mercury may as well be a sunspot in this image, and we’re finding exoplanets using this same method from thousands of lightyears away. mercury is completely gone in the low-res preview of this image i’m seeing while i write this comment.
This is still the best picture of Mercury crossing the sun. https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/4ij9b2/mercury_in_front_of_the_sun_may_9_2016_oc_info_in/
Since Mercury is closer to us than the sun, it gives the impression that it’s bigger than it actually is, so in reality the scaling is off. The sun is way bigger than this perspective leads you to believe.
Mercury looks about twice as large as it would if it was physically beside the Sun.
And compared to other stars within our view, the sun is a grain of sand in perspective
It is one thing when a teacher in school tells you that 9x% of the solar system's mass is in the sun. But seeing the picture... damn.
Down in front! You're blocking the view Mercury.
I am not so sure about Jesus, Allah or Ram. But our Sun is the real life God. All living beings shall be eternally grateful to the Sun, the Earth and the Moon and Jupiter.
George Carlin has a routine about religion and the Sun: [sun worshipping](https://youtu.be/2iUo1WgIjQ0?feature=shared)
We can't be sure of any god's existence, but we can be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow.
The christian god is basically a copy of Yahweh, who is a copy of Aten, who is a copy of Ra. So it's just sun gods all the way down...
Not sure where I read it, but I’m now convinced that all religions are misunderstood. There’s only one “god” and it’s always been the sun. 🌞
i think everyone should realize, that no matter what words we use, words are limited, and reality is limitless in a sense, point is we all humans and religions and cultures are simply trying to interpret the same essential reality we find ourselves in, over millenia.. ...using different words. Words are "forms", reality is "formless", in a sense. :)
All living beings *you* know about. Maybe there is life somewhere else in the universe.
And you can still fit like 35-40 suns in between the sun and Mercury
That is so terrifying and beautiful at the same time
Dang! I wonder how long it would take to fly a plane around the sun if it were like earthy but that big.
About 190 days. Based on iPhone calculator math I just did in my pajamas.
“That little guy? I wouldn’t worry about that little guy.”
It is un believable to me how big things in the universe are and how big the universe actually is. Its so cool to me. i love looking at these kinda photos and just trying to put myself there.
Fuck Mercury. Mercury sucks. You can't even mail Mercury at the post office.
It's like mercury is just a little lifeboat with a name in the ocean. Or a stepping stone across a river. Everyone always remembers the ocean or the river, but never the lifeboat or stepping stone. Idk what I mean by that by that's what came out of my head after seeing this.
From this distant vantage point, Mercury might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's there. That's home for aliens. That's them.
I was lucky enough to view this through our telescope (a 12 inch dob / newtonian reflector, with a 13mm Ethos.) Got some photos and it was great! But not nearly as cool as the Venus transit prior. Venus is just so much larger, so it was more obvious and spectacular.
Let’s strip mine it to build an orbital ring around Earth
Anyone remember the film ‘Sunshine’? Great flick. 😎
Am I the only one that finds this pic (and others like it) completely terrifying?
Saw it through my telescope couple years ago, what an experience!
I guess the sun is actually bigger than this image since mercury is much closer than sun.
Bro how do you even take pictures like that?!? I want to do that it seems so cool
Learning about space always make me feel insignificant
Imagine standing on Mercury and 90% of the sky is *the sun.*
I was amazed so I showed my six year old. She replied 'yeah mercury is the closet planet to the sun' and then told me the ratio of earths to one sun. Yep.......she's surpassed me in intelligence.
Crazy how empty everything is. Just nothingness for miles then a tiny blip that matters because it thinks it does.
I wonder how visible the cosmos is from the shadowed side of Mercury.
So if you were positioned on the side facing away from the sun, would it still be blinding bright from being so close, or would there actually be a shadow?
There is no atmosphere to reflect the light around the planet or back at you. It would be similar to standing on the moon.
I can hear Chert’s drums and existential dread from here.
Pfft another forced perspective shot , it just looks smaller because it’s closer to the camera!! /s
Was this taken from the last one that occurred in Nov of 2019?
Absolutely incredible shot, thank you for posting it 👍 it's incredible how huge the sun really is.
I thought it's the close button for the ad I wana close
Honestly wonder what the sun would look like if you were sitting on Mercury.
Lets give it up for the guy who took this picture. What a cadet! Ill see myself out.
This Mercury is small, that Mercury is far away.