Extremely Cool Astronomy News

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
Yes, Jupiter is much farther away than the Earth, but they are both very far away, so the absolute difference in size from parallax between the two isn't that great, because the effect of parallax isn't directly proportional to distance. Also, Jupiter is a lot bigger than the Earth.

PvK

Ah, I think I understand. Since the planets are both very far away, they begin to appear to be closer in size because of the parallax. Then magnify the total image so the planets are more distinguishable and earth's size is way out of proportion to Jupiter. That makes sense.

So if instead of magnifying the image, we hopped in a ship and flew towards earth to the point where it's the same size as in the magnified image, Jupiter would still be a tiny dot no larger then what we see in our sky.

Thanks, that does make sense now.

Geoschmo

[Slick]

Yes, the diagram is as how I think the pic was taken.

The best way I can explain it is that the pic was obviously taken with some telescopic lens and (after a bit of research) the diameter of Jupiter is 11.21 times Earth's diameter. So, even though it is farther away, the planets appear roughly similar in size. If they were at the same radius from the camera, Jupiter would take up much more of the picture.

Slick.

[ May 23, 2003, 20:40: Message edited by: Slick ]

[Slick]

Holy Smokes! When I hit reply for the previous post, there were no Posts after the one with Geo's pic. And it certainly didn't take me long to type it. All the in-between Posts came in at about the same minute.

Slick.

[Aloofi]

Wait a minute, they say that the picture is colored!!!
What the heck that means? that it isn't real?

[minipol]

It's not because they "retouch" a picture that it's not real. It means they make the colours clearer so you can see the colours better. No conspiracy here

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Aloofi:
Wait a minute, they say that the picture is colored!!!
What the heck that means? that it isn't real?

The picture is colorized because the Mars Global Surveyor camera is black and white only. They say that they used actual color photos of Earth and Jupiter to sample the colors, though.

And I think the camera does have some magnification, so no you would not see earth (or Jupiter) like that with the naked eye if you were there.

[Phoenix-D]

"Wait a minute, they say that the picture is colored!!!
What the heck that means? that it isn't real?"

Hint: most scientific results you find for public view have been massaged in one way or another. The difference is whether they tell you or not.

This is a harmless case of that. Its actually two black and white pictures layered together; in the actual earth image, Jupiter would be too faint to see (not enough exposure time)