What Would Neptune Look Like if it Orbited Earth? (Animation)
Scale (video below)
by Brad Goodspeed
NOTE: THE FOLLOWING VIDEO DOES NOT REPRESENT THE ENTIRE NIGHT SKY, or at least it doesn’t anymore. I’ve updated the video to omit the foreground landscape in an effort to account for an error in perspective. Unfortunately, due to my error, websites are widely reporting that Jupiter would fill the entire night sky, but it wouldn’t. What’s depicted here is a much narrower perspective than the previously mentioned 62 degrees, something that I imagine could be calculated by people much brighter than I. I imagine this view is closer to what you’d see through some very weak binoculars, but that’s just a guess. For a somewhat technical explanation of what was wrong with the original version of this video, and what that realization can teach us about skepticism, please read this.
ORIGINAL POST
Here’s an animation I did to make you feel small.
While watching the video of the lunar eclipse I posted the other day I was looking at the curvature of the earth’s shadow on the moon. It made me think about how large the earth might look if an exact copy of it was up there instead of the moon. Soon curiosity got the better of me, and I was animating!
So the basic idea is, each planet you see is the size it would appear in the sky if it shared an orbit with the moon, 380,000 kms from earth. I created this video in After Effects, and because of certain technical considerations had to keep the field of view at 62 degrees. That means the foreground element is not precisely to scale. I realized this after the fact and may update the video at some point in the future. All planets are to correct scale with one another in any case.
Please watch full screen in HD if possible. Oh! And please consider sharing with your friends on Twitter or Facebook.
Music: ‘Where We’re Calling From’ from the album ‘The Last Broadcast’ by ‘Doves’
this is cool……….where’s saturn?
To keep the maximum dramatic effect I went only with representatives of the size classes of planets. Saturn’s a lot less massive than the big guy but it’s radius isn’t that much smaller. (60,268km)I wanted the jump to Jupiter to be dramatic, so showing Saturn first would have spoiled it.
I think that you have the earth rotating the wrong way in Montana the sun rises in the East
Haha – in Montana eh?Of course, you’re absolutely right. Another thing I noticed right after I did it, and something I’ll have to get at correcting at some point.In fact, all the planets should be rotating the opposite way than they’re pictured here, because all the planets in the solar system rotate in the same direction except for Venus and Uranus. (perhaps due to large ancient impacts)
Brilliant piece of animation, the proportions were amazingly accurate. Might I ask which program you used to animate this?
<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div>I used After Effects, and I was able to enter the values numerically. The only variable is the field of view. It narrower than the human eye’s as explained above, but I figured it wasn’t totally artistic license since the moon ‘feels’ larger to us than the .5 of a degree arc than it occupies. </div><div><br></div><div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div> <div style="width: 600px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;" class="PosterousEmail"></div></div></body></html>
What about Pluto?
<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div>Pluto would have been nice to see, but I wanted to start at the Moon’s size and go up from there. Pluto is smaller than the Moon. </div><div><br></div><div>There’s been lots of feedback wanting to see other celestial objects, so at least I have stuff to work on in the future!</div><div><br></div><div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div> <div style="width: 600px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;" class="PosterousEmail"></div></div></body></html>
Awesome. And yes, going straight to Jupiter was a good idea – much creepier that way. I try to create things like this from time to time but without something like After Effects the result usually ends up being not as effective as I would like. A while back I wrote a post (put it in the homepage section there) about the surface area of asteroids, and if you’d like to do something along those lines later on that would be great. I’ve noticed that asteroids simply for being named asteroids tend to be thought of along the lines of the one in The Little Prince – tiny pieces of rock that you would fall off of if you’re not careful, when just by having one a few dozen km in diameter you already have an escape velocity well above what a human could manage on his own. I believe we need to include surface area in articles about asteroids (not just diameter) in order to overcome this, since surface area really is the only measurement we can directly picture – same as a football field, same as Detroit, same as Spain, same as Kazakhstan, what have you.
@Mithridates This thing has been seen by 55,000 people so far, and you’re the first to openly agree with me on skipping Saturn. Not sure either of us are right, but oh well.
Do you have a link to any of your material?
Really? I can’t say that I didn’t want to see Saturn, but since it’s the same class as Jupiter while Neptune and Oranos (I prefer the Greek term since it’s a Greek god) are in their own class too so no sense in cluttering it. I’m sure I would have put them all in though since I usually make things like that for my own benefit and forget that others might watch them too.Besides the post on asteroid size I made a video on the distance from here to Alpha Centauri the other day:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVqy3wkFnrMA number of other things too (distance from Dawn to Vesta) but I can’t remember most of them at the moment. I write a bit too much. An asteroid video showing the horizon, the time it takes to walk/fly around and so on could be interesting too.
I think a good tool for you would be a copy of Google Earth Pro, where you can render out Quicktimes of moving maps. I had an idea for a model of the distance between the Sun and Proxima Centauri as well: put a golf ball in Toronto (where I live) and another about halfway down the longitude of Mexico, and you have the proper scale.
wow great job! : Djupiter was massive as expected. fucking ace!i wonder for how many seconds would the sun take to cross the sky completely now…dangalso, id like to know the size of some planet rings; i cannot figure out any valid comparison either…great job again : )
Put me down as another who’d like to see Saturn included. Yes, it’s in the Jovian range but the rings are a class by themselves.Not sure how you’d do the Asteroild Belt in this format biut that’s soemthign else to consider for the sequel..
Not so sure we needed Saturn, though I think a small disclaimer might be in order:If Jupiter were indeed as far away from us as the Moon, we’d enjoy that view for all of a few seconds, before Jupiter’s gravity well sucked us in and mashed us into tiny little pieces. Whatever shock value we’d get just from seeing Jupiter over us would diminish in the few nanoseconds we’d have to realize that we got much, MUCH bigger things to worry about…
Ok, I’ve wasted about an hour looking for this song. It would be super helpful if you actually gave a name instead of an album that it’s not on.
Been some confusion re: music: ‘Where We’re Calling From’ from the album ‘The Last Broadcast’ by ‘Doves’.
I want to see [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vy_canis_majoris"VY Canis Majoris.[/URL]
Just kidding.A sweet video and a great reminder of our insignificance.
Wikipedia tells me that Io’s orbit around Jupiter has a semi-major axis of about 420,000km. This being so, your wonderful creation gives us a very rough idea of how Jupiter would appear from Io. Pretty awe-inspiring for the Ionians!
Come to that, the same goes for Triton and Neptune – Triton’s orbit has a semi-major axis of around 350,000km.
That was excellent. Thank you.
Great work Brad! I just shared this on my site too.
http://lightsinthedark.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/a-sense-of-scale/Let me know if you ever do any more versions of this!
Amazing and thrilling to watch Jupiter blot out the sky! Thank you for that!P.S.: I’d love to see a fly-through rendering of the filamentary structure of superclusters of galaxies in the universe.
I love it! But is a bit short! But I still love the piece you have done! Great work! good idea! Keep on:)
you should place Earth around each of the giant gas planets in place of their largest moon, this would not only let us see how the host planet would look, but how we might see the other moons in the system.You could also throw several of the larger and smaller moons of the solar system in place of earths moons, like Galileo’s 4 from jupiter, Titan, Charon, phobos and demos, and perhaps some of the more well known asteroids including that one with a moon of it’s own.
Nice work Brad! You should have thrown the sun in there to really freak people out! I think that would add about another minute to the video though. Cool idea!
Great job!It would be interesting include Saturn to this list.
found this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1Yi58jtNdY
Awesome! It’d be interesting to see the Sun and other stars. It’d give a cool view of what some of the exoplanets experience (most are close to their stars). Although it might fill the entire field of vision.
Very nicely done
Too bad you removed the horizon with the trees below.. that added some reality! For the rest, great video. You might also like this Saturn Compilation, if Earth had rings! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoz5Q2rGQtQ&feature=player_embedded
I imagine if it’d be possible to add the Sun without making the Moon smaller than a pixel.
Isn’t the earth spinning backwards?Looks like the sun would set in the east, no?
the music is beautiful btw. i love how it swells when it’s Jupiter’s turn on the screen.
oh, and another btw… people are really nitpicky. is it so hard to just say, "that’s so cool!"
Just a tip about gas giants (at very least Jupiter): each adjacent cloud band moves in the opposite direction. It complicates animation but there lies the oppurtunity for some real wicked effects like whirlpools and such. Don’t stop, love what you’re doing!!
Also, please include the sun in the next video. The sun orbiting earth at the moon’s distance is a pretty much equally real possibility as Neptune and Jupiter.
Awesome video. Type nerd question: what typeface did you use? I like it!
just an idea, would love to see a "top down" view of this to see the distance between the planets and earth too. To get an idea of what type of space the different planets would take up. How far would we have to travel to reach Jupiter? Would we be in the rings of saturn?
this sucks
<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div>Indeed. </div><div><br></div><div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div> <div style="width: 600px; font-size: 12px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 18px;" class="PosterousEmail"></div></div></body></html>
Ila – an extremely intelligent comment
This was an amazing video, I have recently grown an intense interest about space and have been wanting to make videos such as these. Can you tell me how I would be able to make videos/animations like this one?
Jonathan, I’d start by learning Adobe After Effects. It’s a very powerful piece of software, but it’s not 3D. If you’re looking to do that sort of stuff there’s a number of tools, but Cinema 4D is known as the easiest to get started with.Good luck!
brad – really cool video…how about one that puts the gas giants in the orbit of Venus to give an idea how they would look at sunset like Venus does now?
Well done, but it could have been greater if you did as if we were on the ground, looking at the sky….
I was always afraid of Jupiter, actually- its sheer size, it’s mysterious cloudscape. This (admittedly, amazing) video had my heart racing when Jupiter loomed over the screen. Well done!
My son shared this on my fb page. Very cool.
In the comments above it wouldent make sence if we saw pluto in this video because were on one side witch is were neptuune earth ect… and pluto is at the other end of the milky way so pluto is the only one thas in its area
Very impressive and very good job. I have add this to my webpage, http://aspokastorias.yolasite.com/ Thank you!!
Very cool. Of course the bigger planets would never rotate around a smaller one, but I wonder if the visual effect would be the same if say Earth rotated around Jupiter instead of the other way around.