You shouldn't stare too long at this photo with your naked eye or you'll go blind.

Puts in perspective how small Mercury is.

username checks out

Okay Magritte

Yeah I prefer summer to winter so if we get summer and super summer now I would enjoy that until I'm dead and after that, why should I care?

/s just in case.

It doesn't exactly unsettle me, but pondering the mind-boggling scale of celestial bodies and the cosmos can certainly be... humbling, I guess?

I had a co-worker a while back who couldn't talk about the great scale of the universe cause he'd get freaked out. It didn't come up much, but when it did, he'd be like, "Please stop, it's stressing me out" so we'd change the subject.

Less about size and more about size and relative distance. Think about being on Mercury and the entire sky is blazing sun - and yet it survives.

It's very hard to convey the size of the sun in a photo. On earth, it isn't bigger than the moon. I don't think I've ever seen, in a real photo, just how massive the sun is. I absolutely dwarfs a planet, which is kind of chilling. I've never seen a photo that shows anything further away from the camera than a planet AND that much bigger.

Yeah this perspective is weird. It makes it look like the sun takes up 90% of the sky on mercury. That can’t be right though.

Well, my socks are off.

....so are my pants

and underwear

and shirt

Mercury's apparent size in the sky when close to us is about twice the size as when mercury is in the other side of the sun from us. So mercury would appear about 75% the size it is in this photo of it were next to the sun (so about the same distance away as the sun is).

That was in the Red / Green / Blue mars trilogy, one of my favorites. Though I think I've seen the concept in other works as well.

Basically the temp difference between day / night caused contraction of the rail tracks, pushing the whole city forward so it was always just ahead of dawn.

Wow. I was in middle school and had to do a creative writing assignment, and I wrote a science fiction short story set in a colony on that boundary of Mercury. I thought Mercury was tidal locked. I was praised for my creativity.

I was today years old when I found that Mercury is not tidal locked.

My fav sun fact is that it burns 400 million tons of hydrogen each second, and will be doing that for billions of years. That's 400 million tons of the lightest possible element there is. Just absolutely insane how gigantic the mass of the sun is.

Yes, but also both. (a simple example follows)

Think of it like you being at work or home. If I check your house, either you're there, or you aren't. If you're there, you're at home, simple. If not at home, you're at work.

Same with your work: either you're there when I check - or you aren't, therefore at home.

But before I check either location (it's understood that you are only in 1 of those 2 places), you are effectively in both places, and neither place, all at once.

Im struggling to parse this. The picture of the sun with the tiny dot when compared with the artists impression you posted. It just wont click together. How can the sun appear so big from the telescope compared to mercury but be so small from mercury's perspective?

Edit. Actually i think it clicked. Mercury is so far from us and so smalkl that it appears like a small dot through that telescope even when zoomed in enough to see the sun that closley. Its actually still really far from the sun but our perspective and that flat picture makes it seem like its about to be consumed by the sun. If it was off to the side the distance would be more clear.

So more like this

S---‐-------------------------------M--------------------------------------V----------------------------------E

Than

S---M‐---------------------------------------------------------------------V----------------------------------E