[OneOfOne (Trevor)]

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....