What If The Moon Had Been Replaced By Other Planets

We have all stared up at a full moon and admired its beauty. Ron Miller an artist based in Minnesota stared up at the moon and was curious about what the night sky would look like had it been replaced by other planets from our solar system. This lead to the creation of his project where he took the moon and replaced it with 7 other planets. He kept them at the same distance as the moon is from the earth (384,400 km) and did not alter the size proportions of the planets.

He does say that We’d have to ignore things like tides and gravitation, but that’s the advantage of doing things in the mind’s eye but the photos are no less interesting. For his full artical Ron Miller

Moon

The Moon occupies a space in the night sky about half a degree wide. By sheer coincidence, this is almost exactly the same size the sun appears, which is why we occasionally get total solar eclipses. (We don’t get a total eclipse every time the Moon passes in front of the sun because the Moon is sometimes a little closer to the Earth and sometimes a little further away, so it will cover more or less of the sun during any eclipse.)

Mars

The red planet is almost exactly twice the size of the Moon, so it would appear twice as big in the Earth’s sky. It would be easy to see with the naked eye details on the surface of the planet that were previously visible only through telescopes. You could watch the ice caps grow and shrink during the changing seasons, see dust storms form and move across the planet and make out features like Vallis Marineris and Olympus Mons.

Venus

Venus is three and a half times larger than the Moon. Not only does Venus reflect six times more light than the Moon, it covers an area 40 times larger… so the night skies would seem as bright as daylight.

Neptune

Neptune is more than fourteen times larger than the Moon and now we’re talking about something that would look really impressive. It would loom like an enormous blue balloon in the night sky.

Uranus

Uranus, i think this would be most people favorite just because of its name. This planet is nearly the same size as Neptune, would provide a very similar view.

Saturn

Saturn would almost be 35 times larger than the Moon. We’d be more likely to be a satellite of Saturn ourselves than the other way around. The rings would stretch nearly from horizon to horizon.

Jupiter

Jupiter would be forty times larger than the Moon. This close, we’d be looking “up” at the northern hemisphere and “down” at the southern hemisphere, so the cloud bands would be distinctly curved in perspective. In fact, we’d not be able to see the north and south poles of the planet.

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