Are the rings only that prominent because of infrared? Would they look like that in visible light if you were close enough? Those look like they could compete with Saturn.
Voyager saw this: https://www.flickr.com/photos/132160802@N06/40079347843
Even that's better than we'd see with our eyes:
> The rings here are significantly fainter relative to Uranus than pictured here; the charcoal black rings would be near the limits of naked eye visibility to a human observer.
Aside: I think the most useful instrument for NASA's mission at the moment is a boolean "Life/no-life" indicator on each planet, moon, asteroid, etc. Not very pretty.
Meanwhile, the photos from the probes that actually went there are from more unusual angles and you can see some more amount of the night side.
Similar to how images from something like the Himawari satellite (from geostationary orbit) quickly become a lot less visually interesting than photos from the ISS.
That said, JWST does have some images with an ethereal quality of that bygone age of space. Its images of Jupiter's auroras and the Whirlpool Galaxy make me feel quite some things, and it did by far the best NGC 1433.
Not sure what exactly that means for human eyesight, but it's probably less spectacular out there than we'd hope.
Consumer digital cameras around 2005 could see maybe 9 stops for a single exposure. Now they can do maybe 10-14 (which means they’re ~30x more capable of a range of light values).
Human vision can handle adapting to a much wider range because we don’t see with a single exposure. The iris adjusts, we saccade around the scene collecting data and mentally aggregating it. A good approximation is the iPhone’s panorama mode. It’s really recording video and adapting the dynamic range window as you pan, so the sun tends not to blown out the rest of the image.
The main point I want to make is that outdoor sunlight on earth is indeed a million times more intense in terms of lux, lumens, candelas, or watts, than interior living (say lit by a nightlight or candle). This works out to 20 stops.
- 100,000 lux outdoors on earth
- 0.1 lux finding your seat in a theater
So we can see already when the light is 0.0001% the power of “Earth, noon”. We could see Uranus.
Sunlight on earth is extremely intense! You feel it direct on your skin like being 2 feet from a fire. It damages your cells. It evaporates the sea and propels hurricanes. I’d we hadn’t evolved to live with it, we’d find it quite intolerable.
Uranus gets 350 lux[1], which is similar to the light level at sunrise on Earth.
So quite dim but not dark.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/58/1/1.31/2938119
Pointed out the window[1]: 1/2000th
The interior of my office[2]: 1/30th
My office feels brightly lit to me, but the ambient light level is only about 1-2% of what it is outdoors. I estimate that 0.25% is roughly how bright it is indoors on an overcast day or outdoors at twilight on a clear day. It's dim, but people with unimpaired vision have no trouble seeing in that light level and the planet would still look spectacular.
1. Grass and trees with no sky in frame.
2. Shades open, light grey walls mostly. Same ISO and aperture.