The Off Topic Topic

[Threviel]

"On rare occasions, Mercury can be the closest planet. For example, over 2,000 years ago, Mercury was only around 35 million miles away from our own planet. However, occurrences like this are extremely rare and can happen thousands of years apart."

That sure seams ti imply that the periods are a few thousand years and then the last 50 might be an anomaly.

[mongers]

Some more opinions about the matter :

https://www.quora.com/Which-is-the-nearest-planet-to-Earth-1

There is a nice graph part way down; presenting the data graphically is probably the easiest way to get a rough answer for the question.

Here you go, the R4 programme in question, only 9minutes long so worth a listen:

WS More or Less: Close Encounters of a Planetary Kind
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06yhfbq

[Josquius]

Thinking about it logically....I can see how it is Mercury sometimes.
Consider that for a decent chunk of the time Mars and Venus will be on the opposite end of the sun to us. This thus puts closest to the sun, on either side, as closest to us.
I guess there's some mathematics out there to figure out just how much 'on the other side of the sun' Mars or venus have to be for Mercury to beat them.
But then you've got to consider the extra factor of both of them at once.

[frunk]

Answers to questions like this depend quite a lot on time span.  If you are looking at the closest over the course of each day then Mercury will be closest a large percentage of the time.  If you are looking at the closest over each year then it'll more frequently be Venus or Mars.

[Syt]

Mercury's short year (88 days, IIRC?) probably also contributes to it spending more time closer to Earth than its slower cousins.

[Syt]

 

[dps]

Answers to questions like this depend quite a lot on time span.  If you are looking at the closest over the course of each day then Mercury will be closest a large percentage of the time.  If you are looking at the closest over each year then it'll more frequently be Venus or Mars.

Actually, conceptually, it's pretty simple--Mercury is so close to the sun that even when it's on the opposite side of the sun from us, it's not that much further away (relatively, we're still talking millions of miles) than when it's on the same side of the sun as us.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Answers to questions like this depend quite a lot on time span.  If you are looking at the closest over the course of each day then Mercury will be closest a large percentage of the time.  If you are looking at the closest over each year then it'll more frequently be Venus or Mars.

Actually, conceptually, it's pretty simple--Mercury is so close to the sun that even when it's on the opposite side of the sun from us, it's not that much further away (relatively, we're still talking millions of miles) than when it's on the same side of the sun as us.

Yes, it is even easier to see if we consider Jupiter's situation with Mercury and Saturn. So at opposition Jupiter is about 400m miles from those two other planets. But the distance to Mercury maxes out at about 540m, whereas Saturn can be as far as 1.4bn miles away. So Jupiter is far more often closer to Mercury than Saturn.

[Syt]

The season from 11th November till Ash Wednesday is the traditional ball season in Vienna, with many traditional events.

I didn't know that the IAEA was also holding a ball, though:

http://www.iaeastaffassociation.org/

[Threviel]

This is a good film showing the revolutions of the planets during an Earth year. It's quite clear why Mercury often is closest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jxri2rBqs-U

[Josquius]

A random thought, after seeing a Japanese band this eve.
The value of commodified Japaneseness is very high.
And oh so many Japanese do not realist it

[mongers]

A sobering photo, the Hawker Hunter seconds from crashing at the Shoreham airshow, killing more a dozen onlookers and road users:



Seconds before the jet crashed onto the A27, Shoreham

[DGuller]

My birth city did that airshow disaster thing much more effectively:

[Josquius]

Interesting thought I read today.
Given the development of ai is highly reliant on the amount of data available to train it.... China is the Saudi Arabia of data. The Chinese state and companies have far more data than anyone else given how mobile reliant the country has become.

[Tamas]

A sobering photo, the Hawker Hunter seconds from crashing at the Shoreham airshow, killing more a dozen onlookers and road users:



Seconds before the jet crashed onto the A27, Shoreham