BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy What if . . . ?

I occasionally come across some fantasy pictures that are quite fun, and thought I'd share some of them.

What would the sky look like if Jupiter were where the Moon is?

I'm sure you've realized that we'd be in Big Trouble if Jupiter were that close! But it makes for a fascinating picture, courtesy of Roskosmos the Russian space agency.

We would be a moon pancake if we were too close to Jupiter. Is Jupiter mooning us in that fantasy picture?

Jupiter's moon Io is somewhat farther away from Jupiter than the Moon is to Earth, but the distances are roughly similar. Io is the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. This is because of Jupiter's strong tidal effects on it, which squeeze it out of shape. Land tides on Io can be up to 100 meters (330 feet).

It would, of course, be dangerous and scary to have no artificial lighting in a city - but maybe the traffic would be self-drive cars with infrared sensors!

Anyhow for anyone who's ever been to San Francisco, where you can't see much of the night sky, Thierry Cohen has shown what San Francisco would look like with a dark sky.

Cohen has done a series of cityscapes like this. He uses a photograph of the city and gets the sky from a dark sky site at the same latitude.

At one time Earth probably did have a ring. The current explanation for the formation of the Moon is that two bodies collided, forming the Earth and knocking off a sizable chunk that was held in orbit by the planet's gravity. It would have been a ring for some time, but in fact the debris was pulled together to form the Moon. If it had been farther from the planet, it would have remained as a ring.

A ring might look like this in Washington, DC, dominating the sky day and night.