We have all stared up at a full moon and admired its beauty.
Ron Miller an artist based in Minnesota stared up at the moon and was curious
about what the night sky would look like had it been replaced by other planets
from our solar system. This lead to the creation of his project where he took
the moon and replaced it with 7 other planets. He kept them at the same
distance as the moon is from the earth (384,400 km) and did not alter the size
proportions of the planets.
He does say that We'd have to ignore things like tides and gravitation, but
that's the advantage of doing things in the mind's eye but the photos are no less interesting. For his full artical
Ron Miller
Moon
The Moon occupies a space in the night sky about half a
degree wide. By sheer coincidence, this is almost exactly the same size the sun
appears, which is why we occasionally get total solar eclipses. (We don't get a
total eclipse every time the Moon passes in front of the sun because the Moon
is sometimes a little closer to the Earth and sometimes a little further away,
so it will cover more or less of the sun during any eclipse.)
Mars
The red planet is almost exactly twice the size of the Moon,
so it would appear twice as big in the Earth's sky. It would be easy to see
with the naked eye details on the surface of the planet that were previously
visible only through telescopes. You could watch the ice caps grow and shrink
during the changing seasons, see dust storms form and move across the planet
and make out features like Vallis Marineris and Olympus Mons.
Venus
Venus is three and a half times larger than the Moon. Not
only does Venus reflect six times more light than the Moon, it covers an area
40 times larger... so the night skies would seem as bright as daylight.
Neptune
Neptune is more than fourteen times larger than the Moon and now we're talking about something that would look really impressive. It
would loom like an enormous blue balloon in the night sky.
Uranus
Uranus, i think this would be most people favorite just
because of its name. This planet is nearly the same size as Neptune, would
provide a very similar view.
Saturn
Saturn would almost be 35 times larger than the Moon. We'd be more likely to be a satellite of
Saturn ourselves than the other way around. The rings would stretch nearly from
horizon to horizon.
Jupiter
Jupiter would be forty times larger than the Moon. This
close, we'd be looking "up" at the northern hemisphere and
"down" at the southern hemisphere, so the cloud bands would be
distinctly curved in perspective. In fact, we'd not be able to see the north
and south poles of the planet.
Thank's for reading my blog. Leave a comment down below and let me know what you think :-)
