Simac

By Simac

Pleiades, Uranus and Mars

Mars is the brightest 'star', the Pleiades is the little group on the left and Uranus is on a line between them, slightly closer than midway to Mars. I used a Huawei P20 in pro mode, 10 seconds at ISO400.
Mars is just over 38 million miles away and light from it takes three and a half minutes to reach us. Uranus is 1.75 billion miles away and light takes just over two and a half hours to reach us. The Pleiades are too far away to sensibly measure in miles. The light from them takes about 440 years to reach us. Whilst I'm on about big numbers this is an eye-opener to just how big the difference is between a million and a billion. A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 32 years. Makes you think!
Finally, I had to wait ages to get this shot because a small cloud persistently covered Mars, nowhere else, just Mars.

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