Appearance of charon

Question

How large would Charon appear in the sky of Pluto, or vice versa? Degrees of arc would be a clear answer for me. Pardon me if you have already answered this question. Thank you.

Answer

Hi, The average distance between Pluti and Charin is 19570 km. [refer:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_(moon)]. The radius of pluto is 1151 km. [refer:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto]. Both are phase locked by gravitational tidal locking mechanisms.

That means we have to subtract 1151 from 19570 to get 18419 km as vieqing distance from surface of Pluto.

Radius of Charon is 603.5 km. It will subtend anangle of 2*Tan inv(603.5/18419)= 4.75 degrees.

check:- http://www.astrosociety.org/education/publications/tnl/10/10.html wgere it says charon is 8 times wider than our moon, in the sky of pluto. Our moon is 0.52 degrees. [refer:- http://www.niquette.com/puzzles/moonills.htm].

0.52*8=4.16 which quite close to our answer.

regards Jayen

Question

How large would Charon appear in the sky of Pluto, or vice versa? Degrees of arc would be a clear answer for me. Pardon me if you have already answered this question. Thank you.

Answer

Charon would appear to be a little over 3 degrees in diameter, as seen from the surface of Pluto. This is over 6 times larger in diameter than our Moon appears in our sky, and half again as large as the Earth appears in our Moon's sky.

Pluto is about twice the size of Charon, so it would be a little over 6 degrees in diameter, as seen from the surface of Charon.

Question

How large would Charon appear in the sky of Pluto, or vice versa? Degrees of arc would be a clear answer for me. Pardon me if you have already answered this question. Thank you.

Answer

After much searching and even asking some of my NASA buddies, the only thing I have found is that the actual size of Charon is unknown.

Here however is a link to a NASA drawing showing what Charon would look like from Pluto:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Charon_2.jpg

Steve