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Old 02-16-2019, 12:39 AM
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blackshire blackshire is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: Fairbanks, Alaska
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Default α Centauri mission--to scale!

Hello All,

The following “taped-out” and “driven-out” (from his home state!) video (see: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk ) does a great job of illustrating both the distances between—*and* the relative sizes of—the Sun, Venus, Earth, our Moon, Jupiter, Pluto (plus one of the Voyagers' distance from the Sun), Proxima Centauri, Alpha Centauri A and B (including the stellar sizes and distances *within* the α Centauri system), Sirius, and Betelgeuse, and:

He even gave the scale velocity of his scale voyage to the α Centauri system, and what the stars’ scale brightnesses would be. On his scale, the Sun was the size of a pea (which he also used to demonstrate occulting the solar disc, and how difficult and exacting direct imaging of extrasolar planets is, using that method). Also:

This video illustrates how almost unimaginably far away even our ^nearest^ stellar neighbor, the red dwarf Proxima Centauri (at 4.24 light-years) is, and how distant Proxima is even from *its* closest neighbors, α Centauri A and B, which lie 4.37 light-years from our Sun. (Proxima Centauri is invisible to the naked eye from Earth, and even inhabitants--or future human colonists--of any planets orbiting α Centauri A or B would not--unless they were seeking it in the night sky--notice dim Proxima Centauri among the other stars, nor would its ^very^ slow orbital motion around α Centauri A and B be detectable without precision instruments.) Their night sky and constellations would look almost identical to ours, except for the absence of one of the two stars to the left of Crux, the Southern Cross. On the opposite side of the sky, they would see a sixth, "extra" star in the five-star, "M"-shaped Cassiopeia--our Sun. The fact that we, in 2019, are able to even seriously plan for launching interstellar probes to the α Centauri system in this century is virtually miraculous.
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