by Shaun Lawton
This morning while staring at the crescent moon hung low over the mountains, I began to wonder how come the moon itself looks so large in our sky? I've seen how far from Earth it really is courtesy of diagrams online, and their depiction of its size relative to our planet, and I began to wonder if perhaps the reason why the moon looks so large every so often is because its image has been magnified by our atmosphere. Of course, I already know that the real reason is based on the oscillating distance of the moon as it constantly orbits Earth, which results in its size changing only by a margin of 10%. I'm writing this impromptu essay because I like to play with false notions, you understand, since deep inside I feel they may lead to other, separate connections that may be valid in their own context.
For example, we all know what gravitational microlensing is, and the idea behind it has spurred me to wonder if there's any such thing as a sort of microlensing initiated from our own planet, which is to say when our line of sight passes through our Sun's own gravitational field while it aims for the stars. The thought then occurred to me: Are the pin-prick points of the stars and constellations we see with our naked eyes magnified in any way by virtue of the "lens of our own planet's atmosphere"-? If there's no magnification effect for our moon, then one would assume there may not be any for our view of the stars, either.
My imagination allows me to continue wondering, if we viewed the stars from outside our planet's atmosphere--from just beyond our moon, for example--wouldn't the micro-pinpricks that we'd assume would represent each star "out there" be so miniscule as to potentially be missed by the naked eye (considering the immense distance between us)? Who knows? This notion of a sort of "ground zero based gravitational microlensing" (begun from necessarily viewing "out there" through our own Sun's immense gravitational field) is certainly fun to think about, everything considered. If it operates in a somewhat analogous manner to the standard gravitational microlensing (allowing astronomers to use distant star's gravitational fields to further magnify territories beyond them) is certainly a question left lingering in my own imagination.
In any case, I figure that if Earth did not possess any atmosphere, our moon itself would appear smaller to the naked eye, but apparently this is not the case, from what online searches tell me. It's only a hunch when I imagine that the stars & constellations themselves would appear tinier, like diamond point font, or perhaps even unnoticeable to the naked eye, just a sort of unified ambient haze practically indistinguishable from darkest gray and the blackness of outer space. I just don't know.
These are the sorts of thoughts that I assume typically run through the minds of most people, although often I wonder if I'm among the very few who are prone to relentlessly pursue each subsequent link in the expansive, interlinked chains of logical associations which necessarily accompany base assumptions about the nature of things.
What if? What if the starry field of constellations we've mapped out so well over the centuries happens to be an elaborate sort of "optical illusion" cast by the interaction between our own Sun's light and that of all the remaining stars in our galaxy? What if we have been led to mistakenly assume that each star "out there" [which is really long, long, long, long ago dead to us] was "a remote physical object" that we could "actually somehow reach with an adequate spacecraft," when in reality no such thing even remotely like that could possibly exist? What if
