Would like to see an artist rendition of this sky.
Someone should make a VR app that lets you simulate the surface of any kind of planet and any kind of sky based on a solar system configuration.
Someone should make a VR app that lets you simulate the surface of any kind of planet and any kind of sky based on a solar system configuration.
You'd have to take that into account when doing your global warming models too.
Sun −26.74, Moon −12.74 (average full moon), Venus -4.89 to −3.82. So sun is around 400,000 times as bright as the moon, and the moon is ~1500 times as bright as the Venus which is bright largely because it's so close to the sun.
Mars is −2.91 at it's brightest. So 1/2 as much light as Venus because it's further from the sun even if it's closer. These might be closer than Mars, but not closer than the moon.
52 evenly spaced planets in an Earth-like orbit would be about (2pi600)/52 light seconds apart, which comes out to about 72 and a half light seconds. So, the closest neighbor planets would appear a lot smaller than the moon, but a lot bigger than, say, Venus.
I'm not sure how widely the adjacent rings would be spaced, so you might sometimes have neighbors that are closer than 72.5 light seconds as they zip by in the opposite direction.
The article also talks about arranging the planets as binary pairs, in which each planet might be very close to its neighbor, possibly appearing bigger and brighter than the moon from Earth.
Like the simulations of what will be seen from Earth when the Milky Way and Andromeda merge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_co...) but with hundreds of planets !
Even a render of the "binary earth" would be cool.
If we have habitable zone of 50 millions kilometers wide - just a rough number - then planet ring to planet ring distance would be 6 million kilometers, 20 times Earth-Moon distance. With 52 planets along the single orbit and orbital radius 150 millions kilometers (~billion kilometers circumference) the distance between planets on the same ring would be 20 millions kilometers. So I don't think planets would appear too big on the sky.
What I'm not sure about is how we'd deal with sea tides caused by binary planets. Even Moon causes significant tides; an Earth-sized planet would have to be much farther away than the Moon so it woudn't cause ever bigger tides...
http://store.steampowered.com/app/230290/Universe_Sandbox/
On steam there is Universe Sandbox^2 that has a VR version included. I don't think you can simulate the surface of planets, though. (I have it, but I haven't tried the VR version yet due to some persistent glitches with Oculus on many Steam apps).