No I was referring to the size of the disc, which in your original post you listed in “ly”.

“…but Betelgeuse is 5.5 ly in diameter…”

I think you really meant “AU”. No big deal, I figured it was just a typo. No star is light-years in diameter.

Stars are a few light-seconds across, the biggest ones like Betelgeuse a few light-minutes.

I don’t know what numbers the author in the comparisons used and that is why it raised my interest. It didn’t seem right to me.

Snips from Wiki

Its distance from Earth is 641.8 light-years
Combining these data with historical distance estimates of 180 to 815 ly yields a projected radius of the stellar disk of anywhere from 1.2 to 8.9 AU.

Using the Solar System for comparison, the orbit of Mars is about 1.5 AU, Ceres in the asteroid belt 2.7 AU, Jupiter 5.5 AU—so, assuming Betelgeuse occupying the place of the Sun, its photosphere might extend beyond the Jovian orbit, not quite reaching Saturn at 9.5 AU.

It’s not a blessing. These are the End Times, Brother. It’s god’s way of telling us we’re fucked.

Due to precession, Polaris has only been a true pole star for the past several centuries. It will get closest to the pole position in about another 100 years, then drift back out.

Interestingly, due to the slow movement of the Moon’s orbit outward over the eons, hundreds of millions of years ago the Moon was closer, and completely covered the sun so there were no annular eclipses. Hundreds of millions of years from now, the Moon won’t be able to cover the whole sun. Only in this era are those cool “ring” effects possible.

So if these are signs from God blessing the Earth, they must be a specific blessing on our particular time on it.

Actually, both the moon and sun vary in size, depending on how far away they are from earth. In the case of the moon, the difference is considerable, and easily measurable with a sextant. Navigators have to correct for the variation to determine their position accurately at sea.

All I know is the coincidence allowed us to view light being bent by gravity.

At 600 ly, a diameter of 5.5 ly would mean its disc would appear 5.5/600 radians = about 1/2 a degree, or about the apparent size of the solar or lunar disc.

Sorry, don’t mean to nitpick. Still, its pretty big. If Betelgeuse was placed where our sun is, Mars would be orbiting inside it.