Neptune is REALLY really far away...

[thesummerqueen]

For our astronomy nerds...

Courtesy Mr. Phil Plait

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badast...-far-away/

Mike tweeted about the image, and I oohed and ahhhed at it, of course. But then he tweeted again, saying he was also observing Jupiter’s moon Europa, but it was too bright to get good images using the monster 10-meter Keck telescope. It "saturated the detector" which is astronomer-speak for "overexposed".

That’s funny, I thought. Neptune looks fine in the image, and the random noisy grain in it makes it clear Mike wasn’t anywhere near saturating the image. Now I know Europa is closer to the Earth, so it should look brighter, but geez, it’s a moon, and a lot smaller than Neptune. How could it be too bright to image?

Neptune and Triton in infrared:

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

[Kayenneh]

I'm not an astronomy nerd, but that's awesome, nevertheless

[thesummerqueen]

Phil is the man and posts or tweets some of the most amazing stuff.

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Neptune is far away? Pfffft..

Neptune is in our backyard, our solar system

It's all about relativity. From our point of view it is far away, I'll give you that
but think of it from a universal scale

[Welsh cake]

You appreciate terms of distance when you study far-away objects such as 90377 Sedna.

On this note, isn't Triton going to eventually collide into Neptune at some point in the future?

[Erinome]

Wow, summerqueen! Sweet pic! I book marked that blog because it gave my brain the happy.

You appreciate terms of distance when you study far-away objects such as 90377 Sedna.

On this note, isn't Triton going to eventually collide into Neptune at some point in the future?

Yes! Not any time soon. In between 10 and 100 million years the two will collide and Triton will be exploded into colossal rings around Neptune... possibly bigger than Saturn's rings.

[thesummerqueen]

If you can follow Phil on Twitter and Google +, I'd recommend it. He's the one that showed me this awesome bit that I posted in the Ice Caves thread.