>> ^FlowersInHisHair:

>> ^dannym3141:
>> ^lucky760:
"What if other planetary bodies orbited our world at the same distance as the moon?"
If those larger planetary bodies were at the same distance from our world as the moon, we would be orbiting them, stupid. </trolling>

Ahem. All orbiting bodies orbit around a barycentre between the two objects.
/troll

Interestingly, the barycentre is often inside one of the objects, as in the case of the Earth/Moon. The Sun's barycentre is variable because of the distribution of the mass in the Solar System but it's normally just above its surface.


It depends what you're on about - the 'average' barycentre if there is such a thing? For Jupiter, the barycentre of that orbit is outside the surface of the sun, but for earth it's way inside.

Because of the effect of the planets on the sun, it wobbles around a lot, tugged in lots of directions by the distributed mass around it. Same goes for the earth, if we idealise the orbit to be circular, then even that circle would be a wiggly line as the moon goes around us.

Prof of mine has told me in the past he's had to correct for doppler shift because of that effect!

>> ^blankfist:
>> ^rottenseed:
>> ^kronosposeidon:
Jupiter thinks it's so cool.

I knew you were more of a neptune man...

He's more into Uranus. Phoned that one in.




Not too good for the pedestrian jokes, are we blanky-poo?

>> ^rottenseed:

>> ^kronosposeidon:
Jupiter thinks it's so cool.

I knew you were more of a neptune man...


He's more into Uranus. Phoned that one in.

p.s. probably the most exciting transit of all time would have been when Mars passed across the face of Jupiter hundreds of years ago. It would have required modern telescopes to really have fun with it though.

>> ^kronosposeidon:
Jupiter thinks it's so cool.


I knew you were more of a neptune man...

I have observed Saturn and Jupiter passing behind the moon, I always conjectured the opposite would be much more exciting.

Jupiter thinks it's so cool.

>> ^WKB:

Wow, that animation for Jupiter looked really good. Needs more Saturn though. I wonder if we would even be outside of the radius of the rings or if we would be engulfed.

I don't think so. Saturn itself has a radius of about 60,000km, and the rings (or at least the part we can see) extend for some 120,000km from the surface. At its closest the moon is some 360,000km from Earth. We'd be pretty close though.

Incidentally, to walk all the way around Saturn is almost the same distance from Earth to the Moon. That gives a pretty good idea of scale.

Wow, that animation for Jupiter looked really good. Needs more Saturn though. I wonder if we would even be outside of the radius of the rings or if we would be engulfed.

>> ^westy:

This guy talks like such a dipshit [...] (and unfortunatly for them they dont have the excuse of mental retardation )


Are you implying that mental retardation is your excuse?

Here what skilled amateur results on Jupiter look like right now:
http://exosky.net/exosky/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/20-Nov-0117ut.jpg

>> ^westy:

This guy talks like such a dipshit , I have found that it takes a clever person to talk about complex things and make them seem simple , however a moron can make something simplistic seem complex.




This... from the guy who has literally built his reputation at this site on his poor spelling and grammar... If the word "irony" weren't redundant, I'd use it at this point...

"...the rolling spin of the earth within the monstrous void...", Thunderf00t is awesome. But then, I'm both an astronomer, and a native English speaker, so perhaps I'm biased...

you know I have a feeling. There might be lots of european guys in um.. uh.. what's it called.. Jupiter! mm, no.. Europe!

I have a HTC Tattoo (the name of the phone, not a tattoo, obviously) that I'm frankly not that happy with, but I think Legend is probably faster and better. Tattoo is probably the crappiest of the newer HTC phones.(well, i guess its no longer among the newer ones either..)

Anyway, the big thing about these new phones is of course the apps, Firstly, you will need an app killer, like Advanced Task Killer. Android systems have a weakness of just leaving everything running in the background, with no helpful way of letting you know that you have stuff running, which is really annoying. ATK is a helpful weapon against this, as it lets you instantly see whats running, and kill it all in one click

Theres like a million different applications out there, which you can check out in the Android Market. One of my favorites is Google Sky, which is a augmented star map that you can use to navigate the sky. You can search for jupiter, for instance,(which is perfect for observation right now) and the phone will guide you to it.

The other great thing about android phones is that they can be synced with google calendar and contacts, which is helpful, so if you lose your phone, you keep the contacts etc. You can also integrate contacts with facebook and stuff.

Anyway, good luck!

I remain cautiously agnostic for several reasons. I think mostly, though, is that it has never been sufficiency shown to my liking that warming temperatures are bad. Now, no one wants to become like Venus and have rivers of molten lead coursing by the house. But then again, what if 30% of the Russian permafrost melted and provided a farming area the size of 2 United States for the world? It seems more like a fear of change then a fear of anything rational. For example, the year after Katrina, they predicted no less than 4 category 5 hurricanes for the season. We didn't even have one category 4 that year. I think that was one of the main fear that I have heard about global warming is more extreme weather pattens, but I don't believe there is really any good evidence of this. Even when you look to the heavens at Jupiter and Neptune, you see extreme weather, but you see a very consistent pattern. So the argument is 2 fold for me. First I remain unconvinced that global climate has ever been truly stable, and second, that warmer temperatures are even bad.

With that said, I find pollution disgusting in its own right. Who likes smog, really! Who like finding wrappers (I misspelled this and almost left it rappers, lol) all over their town? Who likes getting sunburned because they punched a whole through the ozone? Pollution and general filth still concern me and I think we as individuals should try as best we can to change what we can. I think if you want rapid adoption of new clean technology, keep government out of it. Right now they are, once again, pushing pet programs like ethanol that are crazy ineffectual but have the backing of the corn lobby.