Ever wonder what life on Earth would be like if Saturn-like rings suddenly surrounded its equator? OK, neither did I. If you’re like me, your first thought only considers what this arrangement might look like “from afar”, i.e., as a distant observer not on Earth.
That’s all well and good, but the really fun part is imagining what it would look like from your own backyard. These hypothetical gigantic rings would certainly be far more prominent in the sky than any other extraterrestrial object up there right now (e.g., constellations, the moon, meteorites). Imagine the clouds breaking after a rainstorm to reveal not only a brilliant sunset and thumbnail crescent of a moon, but also those icy rings shimmering in the sky.
Then, think about perspective. If the rings surround the equator, then it’d look like a paper-thin strip directly above an observer on the equator at the Earth’s surface. But the rings might look much broader if you were observing from closer to the poles: the rings might dominate the southern sky in, say Norway, and the northern sky in, say, New Zealand.
I gotta confess, I wish I had been imaginative enough to think this whole idea up on my own. Alas, I am not. But some dude named Roy Prol is, and lucky for us, he’s mighty gifted in the computery arts. Super freakin’ awesome video follows (give it about a minute):
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