If only things were bigger/closer/faster!

[OneOfOne]

I was just pondering how astronomy would be different if everything was just...well...bigger.

Imagine how mythology would be different if you could actually see the moons of Jupiter with the naked eye. We would have a very different view of the universe, rather than seeing the planets as wandering stars they would have been seen to have other stars orbiting. Saturn would be clearly seen to have a ring. A whole new mythology would exist!

Olympus Mons could be studied from the ground. The geysers on Io would be visible in large ground based scopes.

If planets could be clearly seen orbiting their mother star using moderate sized scopes! And large ones like Keck could take, albeit crude, images of the planets themselves.

If gas clouds compressed fast enough that the movement was visible in images taken several years apart.

Galaxies turned fast enough that their motion could be captured, over several decades you could make a time lapse of Andromeda spinning.

If you could actually see the lunar lander in a backyard scope, and the rover tracks in a very large scope.

We had craft fast enough that we could reach Mars in a couple of weeks. When McNaught appeared, we could have launched a craft to follow it in its passage around the Sun and beyond. Even to be able to launch interstellar craft that could reach Alpha Centauri in just a few years and send back images!

Wouldn't it be grand! Oh well, back to reality....

[casstony]

Just yesterday I was wondering about how exciting it would be to have an Earth twin instead of Mars, something we could simply land on and set up camp. It would be fascinating to see how life developed independently on the other planet. Would we have any more respect for the species of that planet than we do for our own? Imagine the space race to claim new lands. Or maybe we'd have been conquered by By Martians already. Oh well, back to reality........

Still, reality has it's charms. We just need faster-than-light engines to turn some of our dreams into reality.

[jjjnettie]

While we're dreaming, lets go technicolor.
Imagine if we could see all the colours of the galaxy. The sky would be an artists palette with the richest reds and pinks of hydrogen, shades of green and the cool blues of oxygen.
Unfortunately, like most dreams, real life is shades of grey.

[Ric]

A time lapse of Andromeda rotating, that would be fascinating.

Cheers

[Rattler]

Where would "we" be if the Dark Ages had only been a single dark night rather than an Age?

Though...a rainy weekend feels like an Age...

[ballaratdragons]

Aboriginal Children have the reported ability to do this.

As for the rest of your suggestions, yep, they would be grand indeed!

[OneOfOne]

I think there is a letter in the current S&T about seeing them with the naked eye. Apparently, in the US at least, there are a couple of cases in the next few weeks where two of the moons are quite close to each other so the combined light increased to about mag 4.3 or something when they were quite far from the planet giving a separation of several minutes of arc. They said is may be possible in a dark location to see them (as one) especially if you can block out Jupiter with something.

[rumples riot]

Yes if everthing was closer, then we might be getting visits from the not so friendly aliens.

It is all good the way it is I reckon. If everything went faster then maybe the universe would not be as we know it. The Sun would have burnt out long ago and humans would never have survived.

I like it just the way it is thank. :-)