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.

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.

Mercury's apparent size in the sky when close to us is about twice the size as when mercury is in the other side of the sun from us. So mercury would appear about 75% the size it is in this photo of it were next to the sun (so about the same distance away as the sun is).

My fav sun fact is that it burns 400 million tons of hydrogen each second, and will be doing that for billions of years. That's 400 million tons of the lightest possible element there is. Just absolutely insane how gigantic the mass of the sun is.

Same reasons for any eclipses :
.1- plane of orbits (the one for Venus and the one for the Earth) do not exactly coincide and
.2- because distances between objects are much larger than objects, including size of the sun.

It's probably more about how often it's visible in your part of the world than it happening at all if I had to guess.

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.

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.

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.

Fun fact screens can't produce "brown".

Who picks wool for their fucking socks?

There's nothing sexy about wool.

EDIT: Fucking. Intercourse. Pun.

Well, my socks are off.

....so are my pants

and underwear

and shirt

Yeah this perspective is weird. It makes it look like the sun takes up 90% of the sky on mercury. That can’t be right though.

The sun is rather large.

Almost 30 million miles closer to us than the sun is.

What if all particles are waves. They just temporarily form loops that we consider to have particle behaviour when observed on a larger scale.

Yes, but also both. (a simple example follows)

Think of it like you being at work or home. If I check your house, either you're there, or you aren't. If you're there, you're at home, simple. If not at home, you're at work.

Same with your work: either you're there when I check - or you aren't, therefore at home.

But before I check either location (it's understood that you are only in 1 of those 2 places), you are effectively in both places, and neither place, all at once.

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.

Puts in perspective how small Mercury is.

You shouldn't stare too long at this photo with your naked eye or you'll go blind.