What If Earth Had Rings?

Here’s a video that poses — and answers — an interesting question: what would Earth look like if it had rings like Saturn? This animation was done by artist Roy Prol, and it shows not only how the rings would look from space, but also the view Earthlings would have of the rings.

Prol says the ring views from Earth’s surface were created according to the location’s latitude and the viewer’s orientation, and that the size of the rings was calculated respecting the Roche limit for the Earth. As you can se in the video, the rings would look different, depending on where you were on our planet. A very intriguing concept, and the video is very well done.

The only bad thing about Earth having rings is that we probably wouldn’t have our beautiful Moon.  Imagine, instead of all the songs, poems and paintings of the Moon over the past centuries, we’d have odes to our rings. 

One of our favorite image editing artists is Kevin Gill, and he’s also created imagery of Earth having rings, such as our lead image, which shows Earth’s Rings over San Bernadino, California and this one, below: