Ich schreibe Belletristik und möchte, dass auf meinem Planeten ein weiterer Planet groß am Himmel aufragt.
aber ich möchte, dass es zumindest von der Realität beeinflusst wird. Ist es für einen echten Planeten möglich, diesen Effekt zu haben, ohne dass die beiden Planeten beispielsweise so nahe beieinander liegen, dass sie sich gegenseitig in ihrer Umlaufbahn destabilisieren?
Ich hoffe, Sie können helfen, ich hatte kein Glück, es herauszufinden.
Danke schön.
https://i.redd.it/agxc8x8huw5g1.jpeg
36 Kommentare
Perhaps you could have your setting be a large moon?
If the planet you’re on is a moon it’s possible
Closest you can get is something like Jupiter’s moons. The second planet wouldn’t always be close, but periodically visible.
2 worlds in orbit around the Sun like that would not be able to be that close without wrenching each other. They also would not orbit each other.
If you’re fine with your planet being a moon of the one you see in the sky, that would work. You can look up what Jupiter/Saturn looks like from their moons for an idea of what that would look like. It could be a super earth rather than a gas giant and still potentially be stable depending on the relative masses. Our moon is unusually large relative to Earth and it works fine for us
Probably not. Roche limit.
Probably not. Roche limit.
If you are on a moon, yeah, it would be possible. Would still have a huge impact.
It’s possible but you’re probably gonna have to make your subject planet a moon instead, and the big planet looming on the horizon might need to be something like a gas giant so it can be large enough to fill a lot of the sky while not being too dense to be a pretty unrealistic orbit or some crazy tidal forces wreaking havoc on your world’s geography (which might even happen anyway)
Here is a real life example: a simulated view of Jupiter from the surface of its moon Europa:
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/europa-clipper/europa-clipper-resources/simulated-view-from-europas-surface-artists-concept/
I think you’re looking for Binary Planet Systems.
The only way it could be that close would be if it was a binary planet, i.e. two similarly sized planets that orbit a common point. The moon in that picture is WAAAAAY too close though.
The actual closest distance is decided by the Roche limit: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit)
You might be able to set up a binary planet system
If they are locked together so the effects are muted
If the planet is big enough and close enough it could appear to look like that.
In addition to Roche limit, It’s more about mass rather than size. You could have a mars sized moon a bit closer than the current moon which would appear much bigger in the sky without all the catastrophic events. That said, any planetary body closer or bigger than the moon would create massive tides.
One would have to be orbiting insanely fast. Presumably you’d also be on the smaller of the two, the one that is doing the orbiting. Which would mean it’s likely tidal locked, and the average windspeed would also be insane.
But only if you choose to apply the rules of physics.
This image is like what you would see from Pandora. Alas, if there is zero air, then yes it would look like this, but if you have a breathable atmosphere, then you’ll barely see any of this unless the timing is just right with the lighting from the sun.
The Planets would probably need to be fairly far away, or have unusual low mass, and in either way also need to be (almost) tidally locked if there shan’t be devastating tidal events that keep the surface uninhabitable.
If they were all really small and impacted eachother gravity in a safe and stable way
Something about chaotic eras and stable eras.
Would have pretty significant tidal forces acting on it.
Wouldn’t this also be a time issue? Maybe the planets are doomed to collide soon, but you have enough time for your story?
Planetary collision?
It doesn’t *need* to be a natural phenomena – you could have some kind of passive force keeping them in place, and your characters might even know thay it doesn’t make sense, thry just don’t know the cause.
There’s a cool description of a moon orbiting a gas giant with other moons in one of Peter F. Hamilton’s books that sticks with me today: the terror one feels everyday when the planet rises and it feels as if the whole moon is falling into it, nearly the entire sky taken up. I had never considered how scary that would be to witness a planet rise on such a moon.
As others have mentioned you could have a binary system with shared moons.
You could get the game universe sandbox and play around with it to find stable orbits.
This is Roche effect territory
Yeah absolutely, if your setting is on a moon. The planet will always stay in one spot in the sky, but which spot in the sky will depend on where on your world you are. An entire hemisphere of the your world would never see the planet in the sky. This is due to [tidal locking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking).
You could theoretically even have two planets orbiting each other as a [binary planet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_planet). By some definitions, Earth and our moon are a binary planet since our moon is so large relative to us (we appear as a big bright blue dot next to a little white dot from the vantage point of other planets in the solar system), but that doesn’t get you the effect you’re asking for. Pluto and Charon are an even better example. Charon is slightly larger than half the size of Pluto and orbits close enough that, from the surface of Pluto, it would appear about 8 times the size of the full moon on Earth.
If you get things too close, you’ll be dealing with Roche Limit shenanigans, but that’s difficult to calculate since a lot of factors come into play. Not just distance, size and mass of the two bodies, but also composition.
Get universe sandbox and try it out. Place some planets and moons and it’ll simulate their climate, temperatures, orbits and destruction.
It has a surface view mode.
Absolutely 2 planets can be locked in orbit around each other. They orbit a center point in between the two bodies. Its gets a lot more complicated when you add a 3rd body.
Jupiter moons can form this view, i guess
Theoretically you might have a magnetic repulsion between the two that are held closely by gravitational force
As others have said, the answer is to be a moon.
Jupiter would be far larger than that as viewed from Metis, its closest moon. But of course there would be pretty significant limitations on the type of planet you could be orbiting (probably have to be a gas giant) and the type of moon (someone else would know better about those limitations).
You could take the photo very far away from the person with a very high zoom and small field of viexw.
The further you go, the smaller the person, but the size of the moon doesn’t change. You the magnify a lot so that the person fills the frame, and you would get such a photo.
The larger moon in too close. It would fall back onto the planets surface. But it looks cool. I say write it into your fiction anyways.
High orbit rate, but the tidal forces would most likely make the planet a magma hell.
Anything’s possible with a zoom lens!
Really though, it does depend on the nature of the system, and how you perceive „looming large“
This very excellent worldbuilding blog discusses some possible systems from the point of view of how their climate might be effected, but in the process it discusses a range of angular sizes, which is what you need to know about when regarding how big a moon is in the sky
[https://worldbuildingpasta.blogspot.com/2025/09/day-and-night-on-habitable-moons.html](https://worldbuildingpasta.blogspot.com/2025/09/day-and-night-on-habitable-moons.html)
Basically, both a moon orbiting a gas giant and a dual planet system with two earthlike worlds orbiting each other could easily have visible bodies in the sky with an angular size of about 10-15 degrees. That’s the size of your fist at arms length, or a little bigger, and much, much bigger than the sun and moon. It’s not „fill the sky“ looming large, but just like the moon looks bigger when seen near the horizon or through a window, or in a long shot photograph, it’s big enough to fill a window, and look really big in the right circumstances.
As the blog notes, though, the roche limit does allow for big moons much closer to their planets, even though we don’t see them in our solar system and they might not form easily, and such planets could be close enough to have the planet they orbit fill the sky.
So yes, you could have some big planets in the sky if your planet is a moon of a gas giant, particularly if there are other large moons.
The theoretical max before they collide is the Roche Limit. For our planet that would be somewhere around 40° to 70° of the sky. That would still probably end all life on earth. Think kilometer high tidal waves. Earth crust rising and falling etc.
For a planet our size, the theoretical max before life ending cataclysm would be anywhere from 2-4 the size of our moon. Gravity works by the square law. So a smaller distance is has a squared effect on our surface. At 4 times the size of our moon, we would be getting tides 80 to 100 meters tall everywhere. So no ocean faring civilizations could survive.
Like other comments have mentioned, tidally locking ourselves around a gas giant is a cheat code. If Earth were a moon of a Gas Giant (like Pandora in Avatar), and we were tidally locked (the same side of Earth always faces the Giant), the „sloshing“ of the tides stops.
Because the Giant doesn’t move in the sky, the water is pulled into a permanent bulge toward the Giant. The „high tide“ never leaves.
• Maximum Size: ~15° to 20° (40x bigger than the Moon).
• The View: A gas giant dominating the sky, visibly spinning, with storms and bands.
• The Cost: You lose the day/night cycle as we know it (nights are bright with Earthshine), and you risk high radiation from the Giant’s magnetic field. But the oceans wouldn’t wash you away.