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