Any probe would be able to see it, it just needs to be not in the same orbit as earth, so even juno or, messenger, cassini and any of the probes on mars would be able to image it. Many of them have taken pics looking back.

Yeah your right, their forgetting that you match speed, but not mass, millions of tons versus 10. Take everything you hope you need and build a cozy home. It might even be rotating a bit giving parts of it some gravity.

I’m pretty sure it is several billion tons of several million kelvin hot plasma getting properly irradiated and shredded to pieces.

Because our sun is a dwarf star, it is actually very puny. The only reason it is so bright is because it is so close, Sirius is 9 lightyears away and is 25 times more luminous, and absolute magnitude of 1.45, the sun is 4.85. Canopus is 300lj away, is the second brightest star in the sky. Our sun is very lightweight. If you put canopus at the distance of Sirius it would be brighter than the moon.

I remember reading somewhere that the sun is not even the brightest star in the sky when you get out to the oort cloud, but certainly it would be visible, but we tend to make constellations with bright stars, so probably not very far off. A quick google, maybe about 60 lightyears or so and it would be barely visible, but 0-40’s it might be in a constellation.

The magnetic side of things is completely arbitrary on internal inner/outer core/mantle interactions and it can even flip, disappear or be stable. The rotation of the core is obviously in the same inclination but the field from it is far from “stable”. Currently north is somewhere over northern canada i think. The physical inclination of a planet is most likely due to material accretion, and then large planetoid collisions, like a mars sized body wacking earth from an inclined orbit, which imparts that inclination (part of it) to a young earth. These inclined impacts happen due to gravitational interactions with other bodies which throw them in any which direction the masses worked out. Chaotic to say the least. That most planets except weirdo uranus ended up with sensible/neat inclinations just indicate they were mostly in orbits and that the disc formed fairly flat. Any significant planetoids in way out orbits likely ejected themselves due to being too weird to become likely impactors (3D space, 2D racetrack). That being said, venus is rotating completely the wrong way around so it wasn’t all neat and tidy.

Compressed does not always mean lower resolution, but could be compressed colour space, or optimised storage of the same coloured pixels. Just, temper your expectations with “zooming in for hours”. Nircam can do about 14500x8500, all the others are less

Jesus i was wondering if outer wilds would be in the comments and no less than 4 OP comments for it. Great game, no mistake, but it is at opposite end of realism with something like elite or ksp. Still highly recommended, basically a piece of art and you fly around in a spaceship solving a mystery. If you mean hard sci-fi space, ksp is your butter, future sci-fi, galactic exploration, elite is where it is at, and outer wilds is like neither.