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Not exactly something for astrophotographers, but... imagine how this would look like. Not at all transparent because the transparency of the most transparent water is a matter of only several hundreds of meter, or perhaps less (?). Anyway, I guess it (the giant globe of water, the size of our moon, in orbit around Earth) would be 99.99999 % solid ice, with a "thin film" of only 0.000001 % fluid water at the sun faced side's surface. Color? Light grey I suppose (water is not at all "blue"!). Reflection of the sun on the watery surface: a diffuse bright spot, more or less the same as the spot of reflected sunlight seen on Apollo photographs of Earth. I'm not good with mathematics and computer graphics, but I guess there are programs which could create digital representations of a giant icy moon-sized globe of water in orbit around Earth (everything according to the conditions of common water at the distance of the moon). |
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Of course you do know it is really a 50 thousand year old Alien battle station.  Mutineers Moon David Weber |
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| I thought it was cheese... |
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| I'm not sure rabbits can swim or do ice skating... |
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Battle station... cheese... swimming or ice skating rabbits... Somehow, a moon made of water (mostly solid ice) must have some sort of atmosphere (read: a coma, just like a comet). Further thinking... could it be that the so called obscurations (hazy or misty appearances of shadowed lunar craters) are, in fact, manifestations of the same phenomenon observed at comet nuclei? (gaseous plumes). Is it not so that most of these gaseous plumes are seen at or near the moon's north and south poles? (possible deposits of ice). See also: the gaseous plumes of Saturn's moon Enceladus. In other words: the moons of planets could also develop comae and gaseous plumes, just like most comet nuclei and some asteroids. |
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Danny Caes: Sounds like a subject for one of the XKCD guy's "What If" books....  What If? |
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Bill, that's absolutely the way I am and how I think! I have hundreds of this kind of WHAT IF questions (mostly about possible or very unknown optical phenomenae in and outside Earth's atmosphere). I always want to think much further, way beyond the "common" and "acceptable" things we learned at school. That curious thing of Newton's so-called "Violet" in his spectrum is such an example. There is no violet in the spectrum! There's just RED / GREEN / ULTRAMARINE BLUE (Red / Green / Blue, as it was discovered by James Clerk Maxwell and also mentioned by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). Another example is the creation of the mysterious Highland Ponds on the moon's farside, near crater Chandler. They are located at the antipode of the well known impact crater Tycho (you know, the Full Moon's most eye-catching crater with the exceptionally long rays). I think the moon is like some sort of extremely large globe of fluid substance, showing expanding circle shaped waves during the impact of a small asteroid. These expanding waves go all the way around the moon's globe and "come together" at the antipode of the impact zone, creating a veritable shock (a moonquake). All of the regolith (the ultrafine dust particles at the moon's surface) are lifted up and descend to the lower parts of the craters, creating the so-called ponds (smooth looking little lakes of fine moondust, with very flat surfaces, see the high-resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter!). Once I was a volunteer in our city's Public Observatory (1997 to 2007). Needless to say that the staff of that observatory wanted to hear school-related stuff instead of my ultra rare (read: weird) thoughts. Well I must say, I was not the right person to tell the visitors all about the existence of the rings of Saturn, or the red spot on Jupiter, or Messier 42 in Orion. I wanted to go much further than the common stuff there is to learn from schoolbooks. I didn't want to be like the person with the microphone in a boat, explaining the passengers about what's on the left and what's on the right. I wanted them (the visitors of the Public Observatory) to THINK (!), not only just a bit of occasional looking through the skyward aimed tube (to be honest, most of these visitors wanted to look through an empty bottle, because they were only interested in the BAR of the observatory!). Dear visitor, if you want to see the most wet planet of the solar system, go to the bar of the observatory, get two bottles of beer, open both of them, aim them upward, and look straight through them. Both of your observing eyes shall receive the instantaneous sensation of the fluidity of that planet. |
