It’s easy to forget that the moon is a real place. We look up at the familiar orb in our sky and see it as a flat, lighted disk with dark grey patches (and a face if we use our imagination). Perhaps it’s the fact that the moon is so small in our sky that we have to wait for a “super moon” to even get excited about it orbiting our planet. Now let’s use our imagination a little: what if the planets of our solar system were in place of the moon? It would be hard to forget Jupiter floating that close – it’s around 11 times the size of Earth!
Ron Miller, a former art director for NASA, has been imagining the planets superimposed in place of the moon and creating images which show their true size if placed that near to Earth. While the moon may seem astonishingly far away at 233,812 miles, when you place large gas giants like Jupiter or Saturn in its position, they would be so behemoth they would fill an entire direction of the sky (and likely make life on Earth impossible). Miller’s images give us a good idea of just how fantastically big, and small, the planets really are (Mercury, for example, isn’t that impressive size wise and would only look slightly bigger than the moon). They also give us a good impression of what a differently colored object orbiting above would look like.
Miller used this view of the moon over Death Valley, California, as the basis for his images.
The gigantic planet Jupiter, with a diameter 40 times that of the moon, in the same position.
Via The Atlantic