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What The Sun Looks Like From Other Planets

These starkly beautiful illustrations will transport you to distant worlds.
The sun as seen from the surface of Venus.
Ron Miller
The sun as seen from the surface of Venus.

What does the sun look like from Earth? No need to wonder ― we can simply gaze skyward and see its glowing disk from our orbital perch 93 million miles away.

What does the sun look like from other planets? Given the vast and disparate distances, it’s not so easy to imagine. But digital renderings just created by Ron Miller, a Virginia-based illustrator who has spent decades depicting outer space, help answer that tricky question. They show the sun as it appears in the sky of each of the eight planets (along with our favorite dwarf planet, Pluto).

To make the renderings realistic, Miller had to figure out how big to make the sun in each image ― but that wasn’t especially difficult to do.

“The only important thing to know is how far one is from the sun,” he told The Huffington Post in an email. “If, for instance, you are 20 times further away from the sun than the Earth, then the sun will be 20 times smaller.”

And as the inverse square law tells us, the intensity of light from an object falls off with the square of the distance. So, for example, sunlight is about 900 times dimmer on Neptune than on Earth because Neptune is about 30 times farther from the sun (30 x 30 = 900). So maybe skip the sunscreen.

But why mess with math when you can scroll down to see Miller’s starkly beautiful images...

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