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Nicholas Jackson

Nicholas Jackson - Nicholas Jackson is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Health channel. A former media aggregator for Slate, he has also worked for Encyclopaedia Britannica, Texas Monthly and other publications.

Video of the Day: What Neptune Would Look Like Orbiting Earth

By Nicholas Jackson
Feb 1 2011, 3:09 PM ET Comment

There's a point in the song "Where We're Calling From" by the Doves where the music turns especially dark and ominous. In this video from Brad Goodspeed, a graphic designer and producer living in Toronto, Canada, that point is queued up to correspondent with the second that Neptune moves into the center of the screen, filling up your field of vision. Goodspeed created his animation that way "to make you feel small, and also convey the deep awe [he] feel[s] at the feet of the Universe." Mission accomplished.

"While watching the video of the lunar eclipse I posted the other day I was looking at the curvature of the Earth's shadow on the moon," Goodspeed wrote on his website, Brad BlogSpeed, where he regularly features art and artists. "It made me think about how large the Earth might look if an exact copy of it was up there instead of the moon. Soon curiosity got the better of me, and I was animating!"

"So the basic idea is, each planet you see is the size it would appear in the sky if it shared an orbit with the Moon, 380,000 kms from Earth," Goodspeed explained.



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