“Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Compared to Townsville.”
It can be hard to comprehend the actual size of celestial objects in our solar system.
One way to convey a sense of scale to such bodies is to illustrate them in proportion to a known object. This is an attempt to do that with the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.
Amongst space science enthusiasts like myself Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko holds a special place.
It belongs to Jupiter’s family of comets and was the destination for one of the most audacious, and until it actually happened, unbelievable, space exploration feats of all time.
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft reached 67P in 2014 after a 10 year+ circuitous journey. From its low orbit around the comet it launched the lander Philae. It was the first landing of a spacecraft on a comet!
To better appreciate the sense of scale, I researched P67’s dimensions (it’s 4.3 km long - about 0.7 km longer than Uluru) and matched them, somewhat crudely, to something familiar - a view of my home city of Townsville, Cleveland Bay and Magnetic Island in north Queensland.
I added a touch of drama by setting it on a collision course. Any such event of course would have consequences that would set off a domino effect of cataclysms, not only for the region, but the rest of the world.
I edited this image in Photoshop, and that gave me the new perspective I was looking for. But having just experienced our recent heart-breaking, record-breaking floods, into my head popped an association with a couplet from a Negro spiritual, made famous by the essayist James Baldwin:
”God gave Noah the rainbow sign.
No more water, the fire next time.”
(Comet image is from the ESA headquarters in Germany, and was edited by me with an inversion, cropping, perspective change, flaring and colouring, and motion blurring. The scene is of Cleveland Bay from Castle Hill in Townsville that I photographed in July, 2018.
If I had used an image of Comet Halley, at over 14 km long, it would have stretched from the city, at right, to Bushland Beach, situated between Many Peaks Range and the setting sun. Unfortunately no high resolution image of Halley’s surface exists. Maybe around the time of its return in July 2061.)
