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This Is What Our Night Sky Would Look Like If Celestial Bodies Were Closer To Earth

Morenike Adebayo

Guest Author

495 This Is What Our Night Sky Would Look Like If Celestial Bodies Were Closer To Earth — Studios Roscosmos/A giant black hole, just a little too close too Earth for my liking.

From the Horsehead Nebula to the declassified planet Pluto, the universe is full of magnificent cosmic wonders. If you’ve got a telescope handy, you can spot many interstellar sights. But what if you didn’t need one?

Russian space agency Roscosmos have demonstrated exactly that in the spectacular video below, which illustrates far-away extraterrestrial sights as if they were visible in the night sky.

The kaleidoscopic Whirlpool Galaxy appears to be sucking in the sky here. Discovered in 1773 by French astronomer Charles Messier, the galaxy is 30 million light-years from Earth.

Here’s the Ring Nebula as a giant, fiery eye in the night sky. The planetary nebula was discovered by French astronomer Antonie Darquier de Pellepoix in 1779, who described it as “...very dull, but perfectly outlined.” The Ring Nebula is about 2,000 light-years from Earth.

And here’s the Pleiades star cluster in the sky as uninterested campers settle down for an evening meal. This can be sighted from the Northern Hemisphere during the winter months, but not as clearly as the others since the cluster is about 440 light-years from Earth.