I’m just curious, but would the constellations appear appreciably different on another planet of our solar system?
For example, the Belt of Orion I know is made of three stars of vastly different distance from the viewer, but just seem clustered in the same general area. Would one or more seem notiably out-of-line on, say, pluto? Or is the vast distance from us and Pluto still not enough to shift perspective?
Pluto is, at most, about 4.6 billion miles from the sun. The nearest stars are in the Alpha Centauri system, which is about 25 trillion miles from us, over 5000 times farther. You won’t be able to see any difference in the position of any stars.
Of course, from Pluto the Sun itself would appear to be only a star which is far brighter than any other.
By going to Pluto, my back-of-the-envelope calculation tells me that Alpha Centauri’s position will change due to parallax by about 30 arcseconds, or roughly 1/60th the diameter of the full Moon in the sky. You wouldn’t notice that with the eye, and other stars would shift even less.
You’d have to go to the nearest stars to really see any difference in the constellations.
I’ll note also that the Sun would be a barely discernable disk, but still whoppingly bright, far brighter than the full Moon as seen from the Earth.
Found a cool program today that might interest you guys. Its a 3d data viewer that includes a dataset for several thousand stars in the Milky Way. When it starts up you’re at the position of the Sun and you can make out several constellations. I finally found the big dipper (look for the stars Mizar, Merak, and Dubhe) and took off flying towards it. Its easy to see the constellation mutate as you near it. Its on a much larger scale than the solar system however. You can activate a sphere grid representing the Oort cloud (which happens to have a 50000 AU radius, – button labeled G12) which is pretty small compared to everything else. And only a portion of the Milky Way is included in this… Very humbling.
Get it here: http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/hp/vo/partiview/pv_download.html
Oh, and its easier to see the constellations if you turn off point representations of stars and turn on polygons and textures. Requires a pretty beefy machine.
Wow, sigSEGV. That’s the coolest program I’ve downloaded in quite a while. But then again, I’m a bit of an astronomy nerd. I like how most of the datasets are real - it really adds to the experience of zooming about among the stars and pulsars and clusters and stuff. And zooming right out from the sun to the scale of our local neighborhood of galaxies, at a leisurely pace of thousands of times the speed of light, is very impressive indeed.
sigSEGV, that’s great! Thanks!