I know where I'm landing 1st when Horizons launches

Ziljan

Ziljan
Fastest moon in the galaxy?

11.8 LY from earth is a little grey moon called Mitterand Hollow. A rocky airless world that orbits an Earthlike called New Africa in the Epsilon Indi system. If this sounds drab, hold onto your hat, and your lunch. This small moon is SO CLOSE to it's parent that it takes roughly 86 seconds to complete a single tidally locked orbit around New Africa!!! This means that if you are on the earth side of the moon, the "earth" will be so huge that the sky will be mostly blue, well for about 43 seconds anyway (assuming it is really tidally locked in Horizons, right now it isn't!).

If you land here, be sure to bring your brown paper bag. It's quite the merry go round!!

Sunrise on Mitterand Hollow:

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Earthrise
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Earthset
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Antipodes Earthrise
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Antipodes Earthset
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System Information
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Just landing on this little moon is going to be quite the challenge since it can actually outrun you in SC! It moves very quickly and will even push you backwards (bug??) before dropping into normal space, unless you approach very slowly. It says it's tidally locked, but the moon definitely rotates away from the planet when glued to the same surface in normal space, as you can see from the pictures above. On a side note, I am not sure why this planet hasn't been ripped apart by tidal forces into a ring system? Maybe it's about to be? Better come here quick then before it's a pile of space dust!!
 
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Katie Byrne

Katie Byrne
First place im going to land is Europa.

Presuming it is allowed. Europa is an Icy moon but IRL it technically does have a *tenuous* atmosphere so we will see how FD approach it
 

Myristyl

Myristyl
That is an interesting find. I will have to go and have a look. As yet I haven't decided where to try landing first.
 

Katie Byrne

Katie Byrne
Ziljan said:
the "earth" will be so huge that the sky will be mostly blue, well for about 48 seconds anyway (assuming it is really tidally locked in Horizons, right now it isn't!).
Click to expand...

why 48 seconds? If it is tidally locked then the same side will always face the planet. that's what tidal locking is.
 

Zeta Legion

Z
That's really cool.

I can't for the life of me remember where it was, but I found a binary planet that orbits so close, I don't think you could squeeze a ship between them without leaving Supercruise.

I almost wonder if those planets shared atmosphere between each other...
 

majogl

M
How about HIP 38064? These two binary planets, I recorded a while back, both have no atmosphere, have rings that are not on the same plane and one of them has lava on the surface... Not to mention they are so close to their star, they are within fuel-scoooping range

[video=youtube;0QhclgWP6Pc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QhclgWP6Pc[/video]

wBSTLL8.jpg
 
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Ziljan

Ziljan
CMDR Burnes of the 15th said:
why 48 seconds? If it is tidally locked then the same side will always face the planet. that's what tidal locking is.
Click to expand...


Good question. A tidally locked moon just means that moon always shows the same moon-face to it's planet. But it still rotates around the planet relative to the parent star, so the moon sees both the day and night time side of that planet during each orbit.

What you are suggesting is that a tidally locked moon is always between the Star and the Planet. But that would actually mean that the Moon was not only tidally locked to the planet but also to the Star. This could only be true if Moon existed at the L1 langrage point between the Planet and the Star. The place between the Planet and Star where the gravitational forces from each object where equal to the combined centrifugal forces of the overlapping orbits.

For example the SOHO solar observatory satellite exist at the L1 langrange point between the Earth and the Sun:

[video=youtube_share;cGm-nrgAIzM]https://youtu.be/cGm-nrgAIzM[/video]

Phil Plait on Langrange Points, pretty darn cool explanation actually:

[video=youtube;kD9qx6ZKc6k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD9qx6ZKc6k[/video]
 
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Katie Byrne

Katie Byrne
Ziljan said:
A tidally locked moon just means that moon always shows the same moon-face to it's planet. But it still rotates around the planet relative to the parent star, so the moon sees both the day and night time side of that planet during each orbit.

What you are suggesting is that a tidally locked moon is always between the Star and the Planet. But that would actually mean that the Moon was not only tidally locked, but also existed at the L1 langrage point between the Planet and the Star. This means that that moon would be both tidally locked to the planet and to the Star.


Eg at a similar place (Earth-Sun L1 langrange point) as the SOHO solar observatory satellite:

https://youtu.be/cGm-nrgAIzM
Click to expand...

No I was suggesting that if you landed on the planet facing side of the moon, you would always be able to see the planet.

What i failed to see was that you meant the light (day) side of the planet.
 

Zenith

Zenith
That is indeed a very impressive visual system majogl. I'll have to check that out.
I'm making a bucket list of places to go land in-game. So far there's 11 places on it. Mitterand Hollow makes it 12, and HIP 38064 makes it 13.
 

Aerodeon

Aerodeon
I have an itch to visit Triton. There are cracks all over the planet. I want to make a trip down one of them to get it out of my system.

In real life, there are nitrogen geysers that shoot miles up into the air until they are whipped away at 90 degrees by the high altitude winds in the thin atmosephere. It's covered in pink snow and has the gorgeous Neptune in the background.

If they can get anything like that in the simulation, I'd be blown away.
 

majogl

M
If the thing really makes a full orbit in under one minute, I believe I would be quite nauseated after 10 minutes of that particular surface... Imagine that the day on the moon is 24 minutes long, that means every minute the sun will shift by 7.5 degrees on the sky...
 

Ziljan

Ziljan
majogl said:
If the thing really makes a full orbit in under one minute, I believe I would be quite nauseated after 10 minutes of that particular surface... Imagine that the day on the moon is 24 minutes long, that means every minute the sun will shift by 7.5 degrees on the sky...
Click to expand...

The orbit is 1 and half minutes. But yeah, the stars would moving very fast. Luckily they would mostly be blocked by the planet on one side. Though, gravity would be much stronger on that side than the outside. In fact, it's moving so fast, I have to wonder if there would even be enough gravity to keep you bound to the moon on the outer hemisphere.
 

majogl

M
Ziljan said:
The orbit is 1 and half minutes. But yeah, the stars would moving very fast. Luckily they would mostly be blocked by the planet on one side. Though, gravity would be much stronger on that side than the outside. In fact, it's moving so fast, I have to wonder if there would even be enough gravity to keep you bound to the moon on the outer hemisphere.
Click to expand...

Why would the stars be mostly blocked by the planet? The moon is tidally locked, meaning that if you land on the side that is facing away from the planet, you wont see it once...
 
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