Speed Reads

Nature's Wonders

What if the moon orbited at the same distance as the International Space Station?


A skilled animator on YouTube imagined what it would look like:

Pretty cool! According to Phil Plait, this is sped up quite a bit; the moon would take about five minutes to cross the sky. It's worth noting that if it were that close, we'd all be killed by earthquakes; tides would be 100,000 times stronger than they are now, and the sheer gravitational stress on the moon would rip it apart into Saturn-style rings.