3 ms·
It wouldn't be too dim, your eyes have remarkable dynamic range. Brightness is experienced more like sound, with sensory capacity of many orders of magnitude, t
by LeifCarrotson 3y ago
It wouldn't be too dim, your eyes have remarkable dynamic range. Brightness is experienced more like sound, with sensory capacity of many orders of magnitude, than a physical scalar sense like weight or distance.
Wikipedia says [1] the solar radiation on Uranus is 3.4-4 W/m^2. Imagine lighting up a square meter of wall with a 3W pocket inspection light, or a mood-lit room with just a few 8W bulbs. Reading might be a little bit of a strain after a while, but I think your eyes would quickly adjust.
When New Horizons was going past Pluto, Nasa put out the #PlutoTime website [2]. Pluto is about 30 AU from Earth, Uranus is about 20 AU out, so at a particular moment around twilight - when it's bright enough to walk around without artificial lighting and to take a photo - it will be as bright as it is on Uranus. The widget is dead, but it's still accessible through archive.org. Unfortunately, it's no longer accurate, it seems to be linked to the time and date when the site was archived. I'm neither a web dev nor an astronomer, but I exported the JS and it seems to provide reasonable results:
https://jsfiddle.net/9btumsj6/ https://jsfiddle.net/9btumsj6/
Anyone have an idea of what solar_angle should be to simulate Uranus or Neptune? Apparently, when the sun is -1.5 degrees below the horizon here, that's about right for Pluto illumination. Just reducing the angle by three from -1.5 to -0.5 changes the time by about 6 minutes of twilight...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Intensity_in_the_Solar_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight#Intensity_in_the_Sola...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20150827083531/http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/plutotime/ https://web.archive.org/web/20150827083531/http://solarsyste...
- bloopernova 3y agoThank you for a very interesting comment, I appreciate the work you put into it.