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The angular diameter of the Sun is about the same as that of the Moon. (The Sun's diameter is 400 times as large and its distance also; the Sun is 200,000 to 500,000 times as bright as the full Moon (figures vary), corresponding to an angular diameter ratio of 450 to 700, so a celestial body with a diameter of 2.5–4″ and the same brightness ...
The size of solid bodies does not include an object's atmosphere. For example, Titan looks bigger than Ganymede, but its solid body is smaller. For the giant planets , the "radius" is defined as the distance from the center at which the atmosphere reaches 1 bar of atmospheric pressure.
The Sun is much larger than the Moon, but it is the vastly greater distance that gives it the same apparent size as the much closer and much smaller Moon from the perspective of Earth. The variations in apparent size, due to the non-circular orbits, are nearly the same as well, though occurring in different cycles.
He reasoned that it was a giant flaming ball of metal even larger than the land of the Peloponnesus and that the Moon reflected the light of the Sun. [176] Eratosthenes estimated the distance between Earth and the Sun in the third century BC as "of stadia myriads 400 and 80000", the translation of which is ambiguous, implying either 4,080,000 ...
The book On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon, which is ascribed to Aristarchus, says the distance to the Sun is 18 to 20 times the distance to the Moon, whereas the true ratio is about 389.174. The latter estimate was based on the angle between the half-moon and the Sun, which he estimated as 87° (the true value being close to 89. ...
The apparent size of the Sun and the Moon in the sky. The size of the Earth's shadow in relation to the Moon during a lunar eclipse; The angle between the Sun and Moon during a half moon is 90°. The rest of the article details a reconstruction of Aristarchus' method and results. [4] The reconstruction uses the following variables:
Thus, the Sun occupies 0.00001% (1 part in 10 7) of the volume of a sphere with a radius the size of Earth's orbit, whereas Earth's volume is roughly 1 millionth (10 −6) that of the Sun. Jupiter, the largest planet, is 5.2 AU from the Sun and has a radius of 71,000 km (0.00047 AU; 44,000 mi), whereas the most distant planet, Neptune, is 30 AU ...
A diagram of the Moon seen against a cloud of the same size, at different heights in the sky. When the Moon is high, the clouds it is against are closer to the viewer and appear larger. When the Moon is low in the sky, the same clouds are further away and appear smaller, giving the illusion of a larger Moon.