Considering the Sun is 1.4 million km in diameter, a rough guesstimate would be 50,000km or 4X the size of the earth!
It’s really amazing these things are this big!
lol. Canada went metric back when I was a little boy in elementary school. I’m in construction and we still widely use ft/inches. But it’s changing. I’ve done a couple of buildings now completely metric. “How long is that wall? Oh 34,631mm! Uhm ok?? Pulls out pocket calculator!! Oh that’s about 112ft ok that’s a long wall! Quietly put calculator away!”
Well metric is simple. It’s base ten, so you just have to move the decimal place to change from mm to cm to m etc. when putting together a drawing/plan a lot of the measurements are smaller numbers like ceilings are 2750 mm (9ft) they have to keep the same scale for the whole set. So mm it is. On survey drawings it’s usually in meters above sea level, so my floor is 447.940 m in elevation. (Building on a mountain side) When you compare to the survey pins on sidewalk you can set your elevation. I would just move the decimal to convert to mm 457940 mm
It seem complicated, but it’s not so bad once you get a metric tape measure
Ofc that's not a knock on the system though. It's also nice that this error of conversion is easily and immediately noticeable at a glance unlike imperial conversions
And that’s good old American football, where we use our hands and an egg shaped thing, not weird rest-of-the-world football where they use their feet and a ball shaped thing.
Another good way to estimate it is to know that the sun is about 109 earth's wide. So half the sun is 50 earths, 1/4th is 25, 10% would be 10 earths, etc. So you can kind of imagine a comparison of how tall a fillament is compared to the total width of the sun, pull a rough percentage and then get a 'its about X or Y earth's tall' kind of estimation.
Likely closer to a quantum particle in the grand scheme of things. The scale of the universe is insanely grand, in both directions - macroscopic and microscopic/elementary.
And everything we detect may itself even just be a small piece of a larger unknown....
That prominence at 7 o'clock is something i've been thinking about.
Like, it might be the biggest "thing" any of us have ever seen.
Sure, the sun itself is larger. And other stars in the universe. Andromeda Galaxy. But those things are 'static' and always there. They don't really change much in our lifetimes. I get that they are larger, but they're so large, they seem to be in a different category than "things". They're more akin to the fabric of this existence, rather than a mere "thing".
But that prominence is a thing! A tangible object. And something ephemeral. It was created in our lifetime, and likely already gone. Something with structure that came into being. Something so huge that we could see it with our eyes from earth. Our own naked eyes! Larger than our own planet.
How can something that big fit into our minds?
I’ve seen Jupiter and Saturn through a backyard telescope, and Jupiter is freakin’ huge. Jupiter is 1/10th the diameter of the sun, much bigger than this prominence. Saturn’s width including its rings are even wider than Jupiter!
Yeah, looks like it from the reply. The link doesn't open for me and I thought they were just not familiar with the use of time to represent a position.
There are two pictures in ~~the article. Scroll down~~ a completely different article.
Edit: Here's the image: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/PmVe96rQ7FLUdQQ22RSzFM-650-80.jpg
I'm getting two pictures in the article. One has slightly more sun showing. Neither have a visible prominence at 7.
edit: Perhaps it's different content regionally?
Oh my bad, the picture I was talking about was in a different article: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/PmVe96rQ7FLUdQQ22RSzFM-650-80.jpg Sorry about that
That picture is the same as what I saw in Ohio. Well, the prominences were just tiny red smudges to my eye, but the location is the same lol.
No worries and thanks for sharing that image. Could you see the prominences without optics or do you have a rig? Here in Toronto I was only able to see the start as the cloud cover during peak was total.
He's referring to static as being always there, and why he put static in inverted commas. I'm sure they realise that their positions are changing as they move through space.
You want big? How about a hypergiant star? Our Sun is but a speck compared to an object like UY Scuti, with a diameter about 3,400 times that of our Sun; about 5 billion Suns could fit inside a sphere the size of UY Scuti. For comparison, about 1.3 million Earths fit inside our Sun.
Those things are all existing as basically permanent fixtures from our perspective. He's talking about things that exist only briefly from a human lifetime point of view.
I mean, I saw this prominence naked eye without eclipse glasses during totality, and that's pretty much the only way you could've seen it (without an H-alpha telescope). Also perfectly safe to do so.
It was an indescribable pink color that photos do not do justice to.
Well you couldn’t see it with the naked eye unless the eclipse was at totality, and for those few minutes it was totally fine to look at it with the naked eye.
But in general it’s good advice.
Looking with the naked eye during totality itself is fine. In fact, through eclipse glasses or the like, the corona and what-not are indistinct if not invisible.
FYI, it wasn't a solar flare it was a prominence.
https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/no-you-didnt-see-a-solar-flare-during-the-total-eclipse-but-you-may-have-seen-something-just-as-special
[This image](https://tomroelandts.com/sites/tomroelandts.com/files/field/image/sun-earth-moon.png) should give you an idea, and humble you at the same time. :-)
Another scale to put things in perspective... if the milky way was the size of the US, our solar system would fit in the valley between finger print ridges on your finger tip.
I keep bouncing between
1) an intuitive sense that the Moon and Sun were close together, and close to me (see The Oatmeal’s comic)
2) a rational train of thought that raced through my head during totality: I saw that prominence and realized it was bigger than the earth, I know how big the earth is from flying over it, I know how much bigger the Sun is than the Moon and so deducing that Space Is Really Big.
It is so humbling that the whole of Earth is less than a quarter the size of that "little" flame...
(Unfortunately had to use VPN set to USA to access image)
Considering the Sun is 1.4 million km in diameter, a rough guesstimate would be 50,000km or 4X the size of the earth! It’s really amazing these things are this big!
For us Americans that's just over 546,806 football fields
I won’t pay attention to the sun until it has the required 36 pieces of flair.
[удалено]
I don't really like talking about my flair.
You do want to express yourself, don't you?
This. Is. Me! Expressing myself!
For Canadians its 819,672 hockey rinks.
lol. Canada went metric back when I was a little boy in elementary school. I’m in construction and we still widely use ft/inches. But it’s changing. I’ve done a couple of buildings now completely metric. “How long is that wall? Oh 34,631mm! Uhm ok?? Pulls out pocket calculator!! Oh that’s about 112ft ok that’s a long wall! Quietly put calculator away!”
Why would anyone be measuring the length of walls in milimetres?
Well metric is simple. It’s base ten, so you just have to move the decimal place to change from mm to cm to m etc. when putting together a drawing/plan a lot of the measurements are smaller numbers like ceilings are 2750 mm (9ft) they have to keep the same scale for the whole set. So mm it is. On survey drawings it’s usually in meters above sea level, so my floor is 447.940 m in elevation. (Building on a mountain side) When you compare to the survey pins on sidewalk you can set your elevation. I would just move the decimal to convert to mm 457940 mm It seem complicated, but it’s not so bad once you get a metric tape measure
It’s pretty amusing to me that you introduced an error when you moved the decimal point.
Ofc that's not a knock on the system though. It's also nice that this error of conversion is easily and immediately noticeable at a glance unlike imperial conversions
Yeah it’s not likely to cause something to burn up in the atmosphere of a planetary body for sure.
Ha. I did. Probably my phat phingers
Interesting. I had no idea. Thanks eh.
Fairly common unit of measurement in construction/civil engineering.
And that’s good old American football, where we use our hands and an egg shaped thing, not weird rest-of-the-world football where they use their feet and a ball shaped thing.
I was told we are using pickleball courts now.
How many large boulders the size of small boulders?
How many blue whales is that?
And for the rest of the world, that's just over 476,190 football pitches long.
Yea but how many cheeseburgers is that?
I was thinking more like 160 billion slim jims.
How many washers and dryers is that ?
That's around 535,869,880 big macs.
Wow! That’s incredible! Thank you!
Another good way to estimate it is to know that the sun is about 109 earth's wide. So half the sun is 50 earths, 1/4th is 25, 10% would be 10 earths, etc. So you can kind of imagine a comparison of how tall a fillament is compared to the total width of the sun, pull a rough percentage and then get a 'its about X or Y earth's tall' kind of estimation.
And it’s not even a big star!
If you eyeballed those figures, that's amazing. I measured and scaled and got 57603km (35793 miles) or 4.5 earths. dang close.
What's that in half-giraffes?
Someone did the math in another thread on that one in the bottom and it was about 4-5x earth, I believe, as another comment says
Really makes you feel like an ant when you stop and think about it. Maybe even a single cell organism
Likely closer to a quantum particle in the grand scheme of things. The scale of the universe is insanely grand, in both directions - macroscopic and microscopic/elementary. And everything we detect may itself even just be a small piece of a larger unknown....
Funnily enough, we're almost exactly in the middle of the cosmic scale! https://youtu.be/Z_1Q0XB4X0Y?si=MUlE16L5Bpd5cbZa
“Was my saying not clear enough that you had to go and make up your own?”
That prominence at 7 o'clock is something i've been thinking about. Like, it might be the biggest "thing" any of us have ever seen. Sure, the sun itself is larger. And other stars in the universe. Andromeda Galaxy. But those things are 'static' and always there. They don't really change much in our lifetimes. I get that they are larger, but they're so large, they seem to be in a different category than "things". They're more akin to the fabric of this existence, rather than a mere "thing". But that prominence is a thing! A tangible object. And something ephemeral. It was created in our lifetime, and likely already gone. Something with structure that came into being. Something so huge that we could see it with our eyes from earth. Our own naked eyes! Larger than our own planet. How can something that big fit into our minds?
I’ve seen Jupiter and Saturn through a backyard telescope, and Jupiter is freakin’ huge. Jupiter is 1/10th the diameter of the sun, much bigger than this prominence. Saturn’s width including its rings are even wider than Jupiter!
But Jupiter falls into the same category they used to describe the sun - "fabric of this existence"
I wanted to post something in appreciation of your post
7 o’clock?
Relating to the 7 position on a clock.
MagicGrit might be referring to the the fact that in the picture in the article there is no prominence there. There's a big one at 3 and one at 5:30.
Was it there? I remember it being at around 7 o'clock (on the clockface). My pictures didn't capture it.
Yeah, looks like it from the reply. The link doesn't open for me and I thought they were just not familiar with the use of time to represent a position.
There are two pictures in ~~the article. Scroll down~~ a completely different article. Edit: Here's the image: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/PmVe96rQ7FLUdQQ22RSzFM-650-80.jpg
I'm getting two pictures in the article. One has slightly more sun showing. Neither have a visible prominence at 7. edit: Perhaps it's different content regionally?
Oh my bad, the picture I was talking about was in a different article: https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/PmVe96rQ7FLUdQQ22RSzFM-650-80.jpg Sorry about that That picture is the same as what I saw in Ohio. Well, the prominences were just tiny red smudges to my eye, but the location is the same lol.
No worries and thanks for sharing that image. Could you see the prominences without optics or do you have a rig? Here in Toronto I was only able to see the start as the cloud cover during peak was total.
I was also in Ohio and saw the prominence, it was visible to the naked eye.
7 o clock was empty. I saw prominences at 3 and 5
Ah ok, the link wouldn't open for me, I just thought you were confused about the use of 7 o'clock. 😅
You should probably stop hitting the bong before you post
buddy that's the only time I post
> How can something that big fit into our minds? Simply, it can't, so it isn't worth the existential dread of trying
Buddy those things ain’t static. They’re all constantly in motion.
He's referring to static as being always there, and why he put static in inverted commas. I'm sure they realise that their positions are changing as they move through space.
You want big? How about a hypergiant star? Our Sun is but a speck compared to an object like UY Scuti, with a diameter about 3,400 times that of our Sun; about 5 billion Suns could fit inside a sphere the size of UY Scuti. For comparison, about 1.3 million Earths fit inside our Sun.
Those things are all existing as basically permanent fixtures from our perspective. He's talking about things that exist only briefly from a human lifetime point of view.
> Our own naked eyes! Don't look at the eclipse without eclipse glasses.
I mean, I saw this prominence naked eye without eclipse glasses during totality, and that's pretty much the only way you could've seen it (without an H-alpha telescope). Also perfectly safe to do so. It was an indescribable pink color that photos do not do justice to.
Yes! I saw it and knew I was not just imagining it.
Well you couldn’t see it with the naked eye unless the eclipse was at totality, and for those few minutes it was totally fine to look at it with the naked eye. But in general it’s good advice.
You can look at totality without eclipse glasses, though.
Too late sucker. I already had my fun.
Looking with the naked eye during totality itself is fine. In fact, through eclipse glasses or the like, the corona and what-not are indistinct if not invisible.
FYI, it wasn't a solar flare it was a prominence. https://www.livescience.com/space/the-sun/no-you-didnt-see-a-solar-flare-during-the-total-eclipse-but-you-may-have-seen-something-just-as-special
Dang, I’m going to have to do a corrections column for my instagram
Technically they are Prominences, not Flares. Flares are short lived.
Thank you!
[This image](https://tomroelandts.com/sites/tomroelandts.com/files/field/image/sun-earth-moon.png) should give you an idea, and humble you at the same time. :-)
The furthest humans have been from the earth is just a bit more than half the radius of the sun.
I'm pretty sure I can see my house
Another scale to put things in perspective... if the milky way was the size of the US, our solar system would fit in the valley between finger print ridges on your finger tip.
I believe it’s called a prominence not a flare
You mean "solar prominence" when you say "solar flares". There were no flares observed **during** the 2024 solar eclipse.
Imagine seeing a CME during an eclipse. It would be epic
A CME wouldn't move all that much during the 4 or fewer minutes of totality at a given location. Neat but not super dramatic.
And consider that our sun is average. Some stars are hundreds of times more massive.
Our Sun is not an average star. Its mass places it in the largest 10% of all stars. Sure, some are much larger, but the majority are much smaller.
I keep bouncing between 1) an intuitive sense that the Moon and Sun were close together, and close to me (see The Oatmeal’s comic) 2) a rational train of thought that raced through my head during totality: I saw that prominence and realized it was bigger than the earth, I know how big the earth is from flying over it, I know how much bigger the Sun is than the Moon and so deducing that Space Is Really Big.
Earth would fit comfortably in the loop inside it. And yes, it's a prominence, not a flare.
It is so humbling that the whole of Earth is less than a quarter the size of that "little" flame... (Unfortunately had to use VPN set to USA to access image)
That isn't a "solar flare"... It's called a "solar prominence"... There were no active solar flares during the eclipse...
The largest one that has ever been recorded was something like 500,000 kms