5 ms·
Bad luck for the guy having his house under the solar panels. He will have no sunlight even if there are no clouds on the sky ;)
by miracle 17y ago
Bad luck for the guy having his house under the solar panels. He will have no sunlight even if there are no clouds on the sky ;)
- three14 17y agoThat strikes me as similar to "bad luck to the guy having his house under the moon". Eclipses require everything to line up just right, even if the object in space is huge.
- mseebach 17y ago4 sq km 36.000 km out in space is a very very tiny shadow.
- metaguri 17y agoor for all intents and purposes none at all. i could be wrong but given the relative sizes of the sun, the solar array, and the distances involved, the amount of sunlight that is blocked by the array from any observer's point of view on earth would be negligible. for example planes flying at 35k feet don't cast visible shadows.
- zandorg 17y agoI've seen helicopters in films with shadows (due to the helicopter with the camera inside). But yes, that's not at 35k feet, but more like 200 feet.
- jules 17y agoI don't think the distance really matters in the amount of blocked sunlight. The sun is very far away compared to the satellite. The atmosphere scatters the light so it would cast a more diffuse shadow than if it was closer to earth.
- jules 17y agoThat's a ~4 sq km shadow (spread out because of light scattering).
- dagw 17y agogiven how hot my apartment can get in the summer I would pay extra for that. When I want sunlight I could walk down the road to the local park.
- Raphael 17y agoThe guy living in the middle of the ocean?
- antipaganda 17y agoIf the satellite is geosynchronous, the shadow is moving at over a thousand km/h.
- jacquesm 17y agoOn days with clouds it won't matter at all. And on days without clouds it will be a tiny cloud at that distance, one that moves relative to the sun/earth line of sight because it would have to be geostationary, so it will rotate with the earth. Which means the time of 'transit' would be the time the image of the sun takes to move a single solar diameter across the sky, and only for those people who are in the line-of-sight, so it would be a different group of people almost every time this happens, at most twice every year. No such 'guy' would exist.