OK, similar question (hijacking my own thread here…)
What would the night sky look like if we lived near the center of the galaxy? I know it’s pretty inhospitable there, what with the lack of stable orbits, intense radiation, and presence of a nearby monster black hole, but if we were somehow able to survive - would the sky look a lot different than it does from here?
In the center of the Galaxy, there’d be a heck of a lot more stars in the sky. At a bare minimum, the entire sky would look like the band of the Milky Way does from here. But I suspect that it’d be a lot more than that, yet. I seem to recall that the average distance between stars in the core is about a half a lightyear, so that would mean that you’d see about 512 times as many stars, and they’d each be on average 64 times brighter than those seen from Earth.
And on Mercury, you wouldn’t need anywhere near SPF a million (much less a googol). At a first approximation, you’d only need around SPF 135, which I’ve actually seen in Army surplus first-aid kits.
You’d need a lot more than that.
IIRC, Mercury has barely any atmosphere, and no ozone layer.
Looking elsewhere in Squink’s link turned up this shot of the Sun in Mercury’s sky.
