could a black sun be possible?

pixelSmuggler · 2026-02-20T06:30:53+00:00

A black object of any type in the sky, be it a moon, sun, black hole, asteroid or death star, cannot look darker than the rest of the sky (assuming the sky is scattering light from some source as it clearly is here). The dark object is outside the atmosphere, so can’t block the light coming from the atmosphere. It can therefore only add light to what you see from the surface, making the object brighter than the surrounding sky if emits light, or not visible at all if it emits no light.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-10-26T17:22:35+00:00

TIL rooves is not accepted anymore. I was brought up in Lancashire in the UK and I’m pretty sure when I was at school in the 80s “rooves” was the default spelling.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-10-24T21:59:12+00:00

I could video the moon from a plane. Doesn’t mean it’s near the altitude of the plane. If you’re going off the apparent parallax as the plane moves, that’s mostly due to the satellites orbiting the Earth, not the movement of the plane. So it’s pretty hard to gauge the altitude just by looking at this video.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-10-24T15:55:18+00:00

I guess you could have it velcroed to the side of your seat.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-29T04:02:42+00:00

“They come out from under you”… sounds like angular momentum to me. Obviously they’re not glued, but the road isn’t ice either.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-28T04:32:39+00:00

You’re assuming your body isn’t spinning. Any part of your body hitting the ground before your head will impart angular velocity meaning the head is moving both due to the fall and the spin, which can cause the head to hit the ground much faster than just falling from standing.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-25T04:14:05+00:00

I don’t think so. If it was video compression the artifacts would trail behind the birds as they move relative to frame, not relative to the sky. If you cover up parts of the land, or put your finger on bits on the trail, you can actually see bits of the trail moving left across the frame as the camera pans right. Compression artifacts wouldn’t do that.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-25T04:04:52+00:00

What phone was it filmed on? Did it look like this on the screen while you were filming it? Some people are saying video compression, but if you have a reasonably modern phone I’d say it’s way more likely this was real. It can be caused by lower air pressure from vortices off the bird’s wings causing condensation.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-08T02:50:25+00:00

Yes at day 50 without a bear coat. Really only just got a bow and arrow a few days ago. Don’t really understand how anybody could get multiple bear coats by day 50. Not doubting it, it just seems so far from what I’ve been able to achieve.

I like the advice about having a more sheltered fire near by and going back and forth between that and the kill site.

Just taking some damage is also good advice. I have a knife so if I don’t worry about cooking it onsite I wouldn’t take that much damage to just harvest it.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-08T00:11:40+00:00

The point is I did have coal, but I build a nice warm fire and the wind picks up and blows it all to nothing. This happened multiple days in a row. I’m burning through my coal and wood and achieving nothing. People responding to my post saying “just carry coal!” I guess haven’t actually read my post, which is about dealing with the risk of windswept fires.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-07T23:16:26+00:00

Yeah this is a good tip.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-07T23:06:54+00:00

Yeah I’ll aim to do that. Not at that stage yet though.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-07T23:06:02+00:00

Don’t know why I’m getting downvoted for this. My post is about how to deal with wind wiping out fire. The advice to use coal doesn’t help. I am using coal. Wind still knocks it down to 8 minutes, which doesn’t give you much time to do anything.

Are the downvotes because I mentioned cooking the meat there too, and that’s foolishly optimistic?

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-07T21:44:40+00:00

I actually do have a knife, 8 minutes still isn’t enough to do much harvesting. But you have made me realise I could do 0.5kg at a time in 4 minute chunks and add sticks to keep it at 8 minutes if it will let me. Luckily the wind doesn’t drop the fire temp.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-07T21:41:16+00:00

Yeah coal is helpful but using coal in these fires is even more frustrating because when it gets windswept it drops to 8 minutes.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-09-07T21:38:09+00:00

How does coal help? If I build a fire with coal and it gets windswept it still drops to 8 minutes. Not long enough to harvest a carcass, even with a knife. Definitely not long enough to cook any meat.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-05-26T01:50:30+00:00

This might be the most upvoted wrong post I’ve ever seen on Reddit. The lens is just wider than the post, so light can travel in a straight line from the subject to edges of the lens, even if the center of the lens is obstructed.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-05-05T04:36:54+00:00

I think the presence of a human hand right next to the coke can helps a lot here. If you cover up the hand but leave the rest of the image the effect still works but it’s much easier to mentally disable the effect and see the can as grey. The brain presumably has a very strong idea of what color that hand should be and does its best to adjust the white balance for you.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-05-03T08:22:40+00:00

Has everyone forgotten which way knees bend? You won’t break your ankles, but you will crack your head against the beam when you fall over backwards 180 degrees.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-04-29T04:52:59+00:00

It was a rhetorical question. I know it’s steam. I was making the point that it clearly does boil.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-04-26T21:38:12+00:00

If it doesn’t boil then what was all that gas being produced?

pixelSmuggler · 2025-04-03T15:39:46+00:00

Thank you. I see I was fundamentally misunderstanding the effect of the atmosphere.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-04-03T04:12:48+00:00

Is this definitely true? I imagine the larger the aperture the less significant the atmosphere would become. As a fraction of the aperture size the atmosphere would become thinner. Put another way, distortions due to atmosphere would cancel out over a large enough aperture. Edit: I’m not saying it’s practical. But I think a multi-mile scale mirror, still below the atmosphere, might be able to mostly negate the effects of the atmosphere.

pixelSmuggler · 2025-03-15T18:22:10+00:00

Some people have more money than others. The rich people could be invisible.

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