The aim of this thread is to truly give a scale of how small and insignificant comet Elenin is, it should also give a scale of how extremely far away
it is at the moment and where it will be at the end of this year.
I have being doing this for a few hours and have made some graphical images to help you understand.
So for people who don’t know... our planet Earth is approx 6,378Km in diameter
Wiki and our Moon
1,738Km
Wiki and comet Elenin a whopping 4Km
Wiki
It is so small that it cant even be depicted as a single pixel in the above image.
So now I want to give you a scale of how big comet Elenin is, well its 4Km in diameter so lets say that each pixel is 4Km I would get the image
below:
A quick calculation would say the moon should be 435 pixels (rounded by ½ a pixel) so the image is to scale. As you can see comet Elenin as a pixel
(on the left) is tiny compared the moon never mind to our own planet! In fact seeing comet Elenin can only be shown as a pixel I will refer to it as
“Pixel Elenin” from now on.
So how far away is Pixel Elenin? Well... very very very far I first need you to look at this image:
Do you notice anything about this image? Look closer... Pixel Elenin is nearly twice the distance away of our own sun! The sun is approx 150 million
Km away from our planet and Pixel Elenin is a whopping 291 million Km away from our planet as of today that's nearly double the distance!
Now to help give you an visual idea of distance, I need you to understand the scale of the sun, lets say each pixel is 1,000Km:
So the earth is now 6 pixels, Jupiter is 71 pixels and the sun is a huge 1400 pixels, as you can see in this image the earth is around the same size
as Jupiter's red spot, a storm the size of our planet? Can you imagine...
I want to get the sun in the image now to give you a scale of it compared to earth so now lets say that each pixel is 5,600Km that would make the sun
250 pixels Jupiter 12 pixels and the earth 1 pixel:
Now think of how big the sun looks on this picture and how big it looks when you see it in the sky and that will give you an idea of what 150 million
Km distance is... Pixel Elenin is nearly double this distance from our planet: (291 million Km away as of today)
To think that something so small and further away than our own sun would have any effect on our planet at this point becomes laughable.
Here is the only know image (that I know of) of Elenin at the moment:
So what of the close encounter at the end of the year? Well take a look at this next image:
As you can see the date is now showing Oct 18, 2011, the problem with this graph is that it shows the earth and comet as the same size and doesn't
give a true sense of scale in fact the distance between Pixel Elenin and earth on this graph is actually 34,856,344 Km, yes that's 34 million Km!
Now lets get a scale of that once again lets say the each pixel is 416Km:
This would make the earth (on the left) 15 pixels, the moon (on the right) 4 pixels and the distance between them 600 pixels, this is a true sense of
scale of how far away the moon actually is from earth not like the documentaries or mock up images you see, the moon is approx 240,000 Km away.
So how does Pixel Elenin which on this date would be 34 million Km away factor in this? Well in the image above it would be 83,789 pixels along the
screen if you have a screen resolution of 1280x720 you would have to have 65 monitors side by side to show how far Pixel Elenin is from the earth seen
on the left of the image...
65 monitors side by side! Look at the size of the moon in the pic above and then at Pixel Elenin below:
Even if the comet has slight changes in its orbit the distances are so vast that it will still come nowhere near us, and we wont have to worry about
travelling through its tail or any debris it brings with it, just look at it compared to the moon...
Most astronomers say that it wont be visible to the naked eye as it will be too dim but you might be able to see it with a telescope.
Anyway hope you like the thread, peace out!
edit on 30-3-2011 by roughycannon because: (no reason given)