Saturday, June 2, 2012

Other Foreign Skies

This post is a response to a question I got on my Ask Tsana page.

Sam Keola asked:
Love the views of Jupiter from Ganymede and Io. How large would it appear from Europa or Callisto? And how large exactly would the sun appear? (I know tiny as hell, but another lovely picture would be amazing.)
The mathematical answer to that is explained in this old post. And my first set of Jupiter images (Io and Ganymede's skies) can be found here.


This time around, I used a different image of Jupiter so if you're wondering why it's rotated relative to the old pictures, that's why. For the Jovian images, I've used the same starting image because in the year since I last did this, I haven't managed to take a more suitable photo. Such is life.

The original photo with a full moon in Earth's sky.
So. Europa is the second Galilean moon out from Jupiter. It's made mostly of ice, is the smallest of the Galilean moons and might harbour life in its subsurface liquid ocean. The diameter of Jupiter as it would appear in the Europan sky is almost 24 full moons across. Remember that Europa's sky wouldn't actually look blue either since it doesn't have an atmosphere but I don't have a decent night skyline to work with. I'll do a night version eventually.

The size Jupiter would appear in Europa's sky. Or in Earth's sky if you swapped it with Europa.

You might be wondering whether Jupiter would actually be oriented the way it appears in these images. Well it depends. The direction the bands run relative to the moon's horizon would depend on where on the moon you were. Close to the equator, the bands would be vertical (although if Jupiter was high in the sky, it would be pretty difficult to tell. Perhaps better to say east-west). If you were near a pole, they'd be horizontal as in these images. And remember, the Galilean moons are all tidally locked, so Jupiter would never move, just change how much of it was illuminated by the sun.

And Callisto, the most distant of the Galilean moons. Callisto's Jupiter would appear "only" about 8.5 full moons across.

The size Jupiter would appear from Callisto. If Callisto had an Earth-like atmosphere and gum trees.

The Sun
The second part of Sam's question was how large would the sun appear from Jupiter. Well, on Earth, the sun and the moon appear to be approximately the same size (there's a little bit of a difference when the sun is at its closest and the moon at its furthest and vice versa). So the sun from Earth is about one full moon in diameter.

From Jupiter (or its moons) the sun would appear about 0.4 full moons across which is a little bit less than a sixth of the area of the sun as seen from Earth (remember, the moon and sun seen from Earth are on average the same size).

I cheated a little bit with these next two sun photos. They're actually two separate photos and I made the sun smaller in one of them. The reason the rest of the photo looks darker for the Jovian sun is because I was fiddling with settings on my camera. And if you're wondering why I chose sunsets, it's because those (and sunrises) are pretty much the only kinds of photos where the disc of the sun is properly visible.

Ordinary sunset on Earth:
Sunset. A little bit more than half the sun is below the horizon.
Sunset if Earth was at the same distance as Jupiter (but yet still warm enough to have liquid water. And plants. By the way, with these two, it's probably clearer if you click on the images to enlarge and compare the sun side by side.
A more diminutive sun, less than a sixth of the area of Earth's.
And there you have it. Photoshopped images (well, actually, I used Pixelmator) depicting the sizes of Jupiter and the sun from the Galilean moons and the Jovian system, respectively.


  1. Very awesome. So if Earth was in Jupiter's place the skies at their brightest would be like a severely overcast day?

    1. Very severely overcast, sort of. With the sun only 16% as large it would actually be only 3.6% as bright because of the distance. The short answer is being further away there's also more room for the light from the sun to spread out. (Mind you, this is still about 1600 times brighter/more light given off than the full moon seen on Earth.) The long answer is here.

    2. To really think of it being 1600 times bright then the full moon is astonishing. The moon just a few nights ago was so bright everything was lit up. So Jupiter would be fairly bright in the skies I'm guessing, reflecting all of that light.

    3. Yep. I'm pretty sure I included some numbers in that How Bright is the Night post also linked above. But remember when the moon is lighting things up at night, it's still dark enough to mostly appear black and white (because of how our eyes work in low-light). I think the sun at Jupiter would illuminate colours properly for our eyes (without checking or knowing much biology...)




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