Extraterrestrial Skies

[Chris Miller]

Continuing my astronomical bender, I came across an actual image, taken by NASA, of Saturn's sky.

The Cassini flier was actually able to get a picture from within the atmosphere, to snap a photograph of a sky that looks very familiar. The dark lines are actually the shadows cast by the rings, and you can see the moon Mimas. This was not at all what NASA expected to find, given the yellowish color of the planet.

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More on that here.


One John Kaufman, a graphic artist, correctly predicted the color of the skies of several planets in our solar system, a little over ten years ago, using a relatively simple method. You can read all about it here, it's a fairly short page: http://jek2004.com/new_page_18.htm

Jupiter:

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Saturn:

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Uranus:

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Neptune:

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If you were to visit any of those planets, that's more or less what you could expect to see. Though Kaufman did exaggerate the moons somewhat.

Interesting fact: Even given Neptune's distance from the sun, it still gets a lot of light(relatively speaking). It would still be painful to stare into the sun at that distance.

[mrz84]

That's beautiful (both the actual photo, and the artist's pictures). Would like to see them myself, though that's not likely to happen anytime soon unless I spontaneously get kryptonian super powers and fly there. Or a physiology like Frieza's (survival in space, but maybe without the lack of pants part).

[Tamamo]

This is probably what happened to neptune.

[Chris Miller]

Can't believe I forgot about this...

If you happened to be on the planet Venus during a (highly unlikely)rare day where there's a break in the immensely thick cloud cover, you might see something like this(assuming the crushing atmosphere doesn't reduce you into something the size of a soccer ball and the heat doesn't melt you).

It has been theorized that the air there is so thick that it refracts the light at such an extreme angle that to an observer, the horizon would appear to curve upward. The Soviet Venera program managed to get a few pictures from the surface of Venus, but unfortunately the camera was damaged upon landing and only got the tiniest sliver of the sky, not enough to tell one way or another.

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[Majora]

https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/

I feel like this game would be for you. There's even a demo available. I don't know its limitations but hey, its free. Its on steam for 30 bucks.