News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space by iamcreasy on Monday November 04, 2019 @08:08PM (#21448616)
> To Voyager, the Sun looks like an ordinary star – although one much brighter than the others. Not much energy can be harvested there.

This blew my mind. Do you have a reference that talks more on this topic?

Re:Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space by RosanaAnaDana on Monday November 04, 2019 @09:44PM (#21449117)
Inverse square law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law

>(...) Intensity is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source of that physical quantity.

Shit gets dimmer at the square of the distance. So if at a distance of 1 a thing has a brightness of one, at a distance of 2 it has a brightness of 1/(2^2), or 1/4. At a distance of 8, you are looking at a brightness of 1/(8^2) or 1/64th.

Voyager 2 is ~122 AU distant. So the sun's apparent brightness would be 1/(122^2), or 1/14884, or 0.00067 % as bright as the sun as perceived at the earth-sun distance (ignoring the atmosphere of course).

Re:Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space by Daniel_sk on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @04:30AM (#21450925)
Voyager snapped a picture of our Earch (sorry I thought it was the Sun) in 1990. It's the famous Pale Blue Dot picture. It's the small blue-white speck (or almost pixel) halfway down the brown band on the right. https://en.es-static.us/upl/2012/07/Pale_Blue_Dot.png

EDIT: Ooops, sorry - this is Earth and not Sun :-(.

Re:Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space by gpderetta on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @05:12AM (#21451082)
The pale blue dot is Earth, not our Sun.
Re:Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space by rimliu on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @05:15AM (#21451099)
That's Earth, not Sun.
Re:Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space by brownbat on Monday November 04, 2019 @11:53PM (#21449724)
Not as far out as Voyager, but I enjoyed this series of depictions of the sun from each planet, which illustrates the general point:

https://www.iflscience.com/space/sun-looks-like-every-planet...

Re:Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday November 05, 2019 @06:45AM (#21451485)
You should look up or play Elite Dangerous, it's (I believe) a fairly accurate / to scale simulation of solar system navigation. You can go at several hundred times the speed of light and you're still waiting for ten minutes to reach your destination.
Re:Voyager 2’s Discoveries from Interstellar Space by wyldfire on Monday November 04, 2019 @08:48PM (#21448853)
If you're talking about its apparent size in the sky -- just a guess but I think this one is relevant: [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter