Monday 7 February 2011

If Jupiter was the same distance as the Moon…

Brad Goodspeed did the following animation. As always with Vimeo videos, click on the four arrows (bottom right) to get full screen HD. Here's how he introduced it.

 

"Here's an animation I did to make you feel small, and also convey the deep awe I feel at the feet of the Universe. 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 - Doves"

Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.

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3 comments:

Stuart and Gabrielle said...

An amazing animation. I'm certainly glad that we don't live that close to Jupiter!

Seeing the world like that was profound. Certainly the first images of "the blue planet" sent back from spaceships in the '60s did much to inspire the current environmental movement as we could see that the world was a finite object, rather than just stretching vastly in every directions as far as our eyes could see, wherever one was positioned on the plant.

Maybe we need a space mirror, at around that size, so we can look at ourselves on a daily basis and be reminded of our need to take care of our own spaceship.

Nick Palmer said...

I'm very happy to get a non-hostile comment from a stranger! Thank you!

Nick Palmer said...

Actually, just realised you're Permaculture in Brittany - just across the water from me...