This Is the View if the Planets Were as Close to Earth as the Moon

By: | January 16th, 2015

When it comes to astronomical objects, our common sense of sizes, distances, and time are of little help.

Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system with a radius of 44,422 miles (71,490km), is more than 588 million kilometers away from Earth. Just imagine how it would look if it were just 240,000 miles away, the approximate distance of the moon from the Earth.

YouTube user Yeti Dynamics has demonstrated planets in the night sky. He illustrated how different planets would look if you could swap the moon for each of the other planets. The video reveals how large and beautiful some of the planets would appear in this hypothetical scenario.

The video shows Mars, Venus, Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter and Saturn in place of the moon; however he purposely left out Mercury as it is of similar size to the moon.

Although all of these scenarios are merely hypothetical, they do help to demonstrate different sizes of planets in Earth’s vicinity.

This video gives a nice illustration of the relative sizes of the planets:

Nidhi Goyal

Nidhi is a gold medalist Post Graduate in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.

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