The most iconic skyline in the world (or at least in America) would look completely different if it was on another world. On Venus, New York City would be a yellow haze, on Mercury would look glow in the dark, on Mars would make everything rusty and on Uranus and Neptune would totally obliterate the city.
Artist Nickolay Lamm (and friend of Gizmodo!) of StorageFront.com teamed up with astrobiologist Marilyn Browning Vogel to create this stunning series for Wired. His explanation for what NYC would look like on Mercury:
Mercury has but a thin envelope of gas that barely qualifies as an atmosphere. The inexorable solar wind continually strips the planet of any gases that might be captured or retained by gravity. The tenuous atmosphere consists primarily of hydrogen making the atmosphere transparent to the darkness of space and the withering radiance of the nearby Sun. The solar wind interacts with the planet’s magnetic field to blast columns of dust and charged particles up into the atmosphere that then become a comet-like tail, evident as the sparkling haze shown in the upper atmosphere. The landscape is perforated with impact craters and covered in volcanic dust, similar to Earth’s moon.
You can see more of Lamm’s work here. [Storage Front via Wired]