Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by GonzoBytes 3633 days ago
I am astonished that humans can do this technology. Here I am looking at these pics a flying robot snapped from 4M+ km away from Jupiter?!

I wish they mark these pics with some pictographs regarding the scale of things. Like something comparing the orbital distances between the moons and Jupiter itself to that of Earth's orbital distance to the Sun or something. I cannot comprehend 4 million kilometers (which I know is Juno's distance to Jupiter, not the moons' orbital distance..). I have trouble wrapping my mind around just 4 km.

1 comments

For scale, Io is almost the same distance from Jupiter as the Moon is from Earth - about 400,000 kilometers.

That's about 0.3% the distance of Earth to the Sun.

For a good sense of how enormous these differences are, try the video "Riding Light" - https://vimeo.com/117815404 - Jupiter shows up at the 43:10 mark (Earth's at 8:17, for size comparison).