general relativity - How strong were the gravitational waves that LIGO detected at the source?

Congrats to the LIGO team on the announcement of their discovery of gravitational waves!

The articles I've read say that the distortion we see here is much smaller than a proton. What about at the source? Would these waves have been strong enough to see macroscopic effects near the binary black holes themselves? Could you orbit the system at a "safe" distance, observe the merger, and "feel" the waves?

Answer

According to the press announcement, the merger of the black holes released an amount of energy equivalent to three solar masses (an energy given by $E=mc^{2}$ with $m$ being three times the mass of the sun), which is an absolutely mind-boggling amount of energy. If you were too close, the rapidly fluctuating tidal forces on your body would cause alternating compressive and tensile stresses on your body, tearing your body to bits, which would certainly count as a "macroscopic effect".

Sure, at an appropriate distance, you'd still be able to feel the gravitational wave without being killed. However, with such an enormous amount of energy being released from two objects that are quite small and close together by astronomical standards, for the experience to be survivable you'd have to be so far away that you wouldn't really be able to "observe the merger" with the naked eye. I.e., you wouldn't be able to see two black blobs in the sky that merge into one.