r/spaceporn • u/MorningStar_imangi • Mar 04 '23
10 Days of Venus and Jupiter Pro/Composite
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u/heyitscory Mar 04 '23
Pfew... I thought they was gonna crash.
That was close.
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u/TJPrime_ Mar 04 '23
It’d be catastrophically devastating, but it’d also be so cool to watch two planets collide
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u/tildraev Mar 04 '23
This got me thinking- What effects would a collision have had on earth?
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u/yoloswagrofl Mar 04 '23
I don’t think it would effect us much unless debris from the collision was sent our way. Then we might need to call Bruce Willis.
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u/DogsRule_TheUniverse Mar 05 '23
It’d be catastrophically devastating, but it’d also be so cool to watch two planets collide.
I have a feeling Jupiter would eat it up like it was a little snack. The diameter of Jupiter is nearly 12 times larger than Venus. Add to the fact that Jupiter is a gas giant and as such, I doubt you would see any kind of stuff "colliding" per se. I'm sure some parts of it would - but the gas clouds on Jupiter would make it very difficult to see anything.
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u/TJPrime_ Mar 05 '23
With how fast a planet would have to hit Jupiter, given it’s gravity, hitting the Jovian atmosphere would be like bellyflopping into a swimming pool - fairly blunt object hitting a fluid. Not to mention the heat that would be generated from the sudden atmospheric compression. And that’s assuming a rocky planet hits a gas giant - seeing two gas giants or two rocky planets collide would be… interesting, to put it as mildly as linguistically possible
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u/Stieni Mar 04 '23
I remember looking at the sky like 2 weeks ago thinking "the fuck are these two stars doind next to the moon??", went to Reddit and seen 3 or 4 similar questions with pictures, until I found out it was an incomint Venus and Jupiter concunction. Looked really cool imo
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u/FakeTaxiCab Mar 04 '23
Skyview Lite app.
It has helped me identify planets and stars all the time. Great app.
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u/thisisanaccountforu Mar 04 '23
That’s what I did too, I was confused to see the two “stars” then I opened the app and realized they were planets
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u/MEANINGLESS_NUMBERS Mar 04 '23
My daughter loves using it to find Jupiter, Mars, Venus, sometimes Saturn
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u/codeByNumber Mar 04 '23
My sister FaceTimed me in a panic because she thought she was seeing “UFOs”.
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u/MontySucker Mar 04 '23
Pretty much any super bright “stars” you see are actually planets. Or if its moving fast the ISS lol!
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u/WeirdJawn Mar 04 '23
Yeah, I follow some fun UFO-related subs and someone posted their picture of the planets, thinking it was aliens. Lol
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Mar 04 '23
I understand now better what a conjunction means. Man i was dumb all this time. I never made the link between what I see with what I don't see. I refer to their orbits and the trajectory of the planets and how they come to the conjuncture. I always saw two dots on the sky.. I wondered about it, but it never clicked. Anyway, thanks for the pics. Will remember it forever now.
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Mar 04 '23 edited Mar 04 '23
If you think, that’s cool, wait until you see what the next few months’ pattern looks like!
Check out apparent retrograde motion. It’s amazing how our perspective on a rotating planet orbiting the sun affects what we see in the sky
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u/CenTexChris Mar 04 '23 edited Mar 05 '23
This photo collage is truly awesome. One aspect (of several) that I really love about it, is that it clearly shows how the orbital plane of Venus is tilted relative to the other planets in our solar system.
Every other planet follows nearly the same path across our night sky as Jupiter does. Venus is the only one that's at such an angle.
If you look at the history of astronomy, this tilt in the orbital plane of Venus is a big deal because it makes solar transits quite rare instead of common. A transit of Venus occurs when Venus crosses the face of the sun from our point of view. Due to its orbital tilt, this happens only twice in a very great while instead of say, every six or seven years, as is the case with Mercury.
It's a big deal because Renaissance-age astronomers figured out that the value of the Astronomical Unit -- the AU, which is the distance from the Earth to the Sun -- could be accurately calculated by timing the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun. But due to the tilt of the orbital plane of Venus, the next transit wouldn't occur until the next century.
There were several world-wide scientific expeditions launched in the late 1700's and 1800's specifically to observe the transits of Venus. It's fascinating stuff to read about.
The value of the AU, which gives us a sense of the size and scale of our solar system, was elusive for many years due to the tilt of the orbit of Venus, and this collage shows that tilt very clearly. Two thumbs up!
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u/BloodSoakedDoilies Mar 04 '23
-- the AU, which is the distance from the Earth to the Sun -- could be accurately calculated by timing the transit of Venus across the face of the Sun.
Fascinating stuff. Do you have a link to a source that could explain the process of calculating the AU using Venus?
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u/CenTexChris Mar 04 '23
The process involves making very accurate measurements of the times at which four things happen during a transit of Venus as viewed from Earth.
- The beginning of ingress -- the moment at which the small disc of Venus first appears to touch the outer edge of the disc of the Sun. This is called First Contact.
- The end of ingress -- the moment at which the disc of Venus is fully inside the inner edge of the disc of the Sun. This is the Second Contact and it happens very soon after First Contact.
- The beginning of egress -- some time later, near the completion of the transit, the disc of Venus will again appear touch the inner edge of the disc of the Sun as it moves out the other side. This is the Third Contact.
- The end of egress -- very soon after Third Contact, the moment at which the small disc of Venus appears to touch the outer edge of the disc of the Sun as the transit ends. This is called Fourth Contact.
These four timings made at one observation point on Earth are compared to the same timings made at a variety of other observation points, and from this data the Solar Parallax can be derived, and from that, an accurate value for the AU.
I think this link sums up the math and the process fairly well, in a brief and concise fashion:
https://www.exploratorium.edu/venus/question4.html
Entire books have been written about the whole affair. I read a few of them and made an attempt to see the 2004 transit of Venus, but overcast skies waylaid my efforts. The wife and I made a trip to Alaska to try again for the 2012 transit of Venus and it paid off tremendously well. The next ones happen in 2117 and 2125; don't think I'll be around anymore by that time so I'm grateful I got to see one of 'em.
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u/SpaceshipOperations Mar 04 '23 edited Mar 04 '23
Wonderful stuff. Thank you for sharing!
Edit: You too, OP. Thank you for posting such a wonderful collage!
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u/BloodSoakedDoilies Mar 04 '23
Very nice write up. But I have a question: how does Venus's relative angle of inclination make it more useful than say, Mercury. You can obtain all 4 contacts with Mercury, right?
Or does it have to do with the size of Venus being larger than Mercury (and therefore being easier to measure [along with a longer orbital period])?
I'm not seeing how angle is a factor.
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u/CenTexChris Mar 04 '23 edited Mar 05 '23
Transits of Mercury:
You make an excellent point. In theory you could do the same timings with Mercury, but in practice it's very much more difficult, for several reasons. First, its disc is considerably smaller than that of Venus. It moves much faster than Venus, and it's much closer to the Sun -- all of these factors combine to make Mercury far less than ideal for measuring solar parallax.
Its small size, its rapidity and its proximity to the Sun rule out any accurate timings between 1st and 2nd contacts, or 3rd and 4th contacts (that is, the beginnings and endings of ingress and egress). That is to say, accurate timings to be made during the 18th and 19th centuries, when transits were measured with optical instruments and timed with analog clocks.
In short, the margin of error during a transit of Mercury in the 1700's was too great for it to be a viable measurement of solar parallax with any degree of accuracy. It had to be Venus, with its much larger planetary disc, its slower apparent motion during ingress and egress, and its relative midpoint between the Earth and the Sun.
Sir Edmond Halley (same of comet fame) tried to measure solar parallax in pursuit of the elusive AU back in 1677 using a transit of Mercury, but was disappointed with the results. He laid out the case for solving the AU using a transit of Venus, however, and that leads us to your second point:
Angle as a factor... the angle hinders, it does not help!
The angle of inclination for Venus was a huge cosmic "gotcha" for the astronomers of those days. If only Venus were in the same plane as the other planets, then transits of Venus across the face of the Sun would be common and frequent, occurring perhaps a 13 or 14 times per century (like transits of Mercury do).
But alas, transits of Venus happen rarely because of that orbital inclination. The first one to be predicted, observed and recorded was in 1639; the next one wouldn't happen until 1761. Halley went to his grave twenty years prior to that. He knew exactly how to calculate solar parallax and how to derive the value of the AU using a transit of Venus, but he wouldn't live long enough to do it himself.
If it weren't for that damned orbital tilt which makes a transit of Venus such a rare thing, Halley most likely could have solved the AU accurately in his own lifetime. Sometimes I wonder how much farther along we would be if the Astronomical Unit was measured much earlier than it was. The AU gives us the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and from that we get the size of the Solar System, the approximate distances to other stars and an accurate measurement of the speed of light.
Halley knew exactly how to do this in that late 1600's. He tried to use Mercury but it wasn't accurate. Venus was the key, it would provide the answer to the AU. If Venus was in the same plane as the other planets then he could've easily done it himself, and he could have done it more than once or twice. But the odd orbital tilt of Venus delayed the measurement of solar parallax by more than a century.
That's the significance of the inclination. It held back the answer to the AU for a very long time.
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u/BloodSoakedDoilies Mar 04 '23
Seriously - what a great explanation of an interesting topic. I would've never picked out Venus's angle in OP's photo until you mentioned it. That, combined with the solar parallax lesson, made for some fabulous reading.
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u/thiccasssocks Mar 04 '23
Wow beautiful photo. Love how you captured the moon in one too. You did an amazing job showing their orbits!
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u/dscotts Mar 04 '23
“Cold and lonely, the outer planets roam the skies. Wanderers (planetis) the Greeks called them because they seemed adrift in the cosmos.” - Carl Sagan
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u/wtf_is_a_user Mar 04 '23
i saw this outside of my house. my dad alerted me about it. really amazing.
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u/-Reala- Mar 04 '23
At first glance I thought this was a colour palette idea from a design sub! I will be using it as such. Great shots.
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u/dr_drakeremoray Mar 04 '23
Amazing picture! I watched them every night and always thought how cool it would be to be able to track their paths!
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u/seatownquilt-N-plant Mar 04 '23
This has been recent, yeah? Sunset has been happening during my commute. I would see the two bright planets during twilight walking home.
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u/SkateJerrySkate Mar 04 '23
I was impressed by how many people were screaming ALIENS because of this. Smh
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Mar 04 '23
i just thought that aladdin and jasmine were flying with magic carpet across the view of the sky 😍
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u/JonZ82 Mar 04 '23
This shit caused caos in waukesha wi. Yokels wouldn't stop calling 911 about Chinese space balloons and invaders
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u/rallekralle11 Mar 04 '23
i took a neat picture of them with the moons of jupiter visible. never been so excited for a couple dots in the sky
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u/Dabadedabada Mar 04 '23
I spend a lot of time looking at the sky and have been watching this happen over the last few weeks and seeing it all Roger like this is cool.
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u/recreationalnerdist Mar 04 '23
It's surprising to me that though the inclination of both planets' orbits to the ecliptic differs by less than 2 degrees, their inclinations look much more pronounced in the image.
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u/Arch2000 Mar 04 '23
How long does sunlight take to go from the sun to Jupiter, and then be reflected back to earth?
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u/AyeGee Mar 04 '23
In Norway multiple people called the police because of two bright lights that had staid stationary in the sky for a while.
The police tweeted about it.
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u/weakmindeded Mar 04 '23
These have been so fun to look track. Space really is so fast and beautiful
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u/nametakenfuck Mar 04 '23
How are they so close in the span of 10 days, did their relation just barely change?
Also moon photobomb
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u/PP_Jiffy Mar 04 '23
That's what it was! Omg wow I saw then on the 7th day while I was working and I was sure they were planets, but I didn't bother looking into it. Super cool!
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u/MorningStar_imangi Mar 04 '23
The impending close conjunction of the two brightest planets visible in clear evening skies has been hard to miss. With Jupiter at the top, starting on February 21 and ending on March 2, their close approach is chronicled daily, left to right, in these panels recorded from Dhanbad, India. Near the western horizon, the evening sky colors and exposures used for each panel depend on the local conditions near sunset.
Image Credit & Copyright : Soumyadeep Mukherjee