this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Science Memes

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Sun God (mander.xyz)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 18 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 12 hours ago

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.