This website is a great example for me of useful, interesting, and original things that can be done on the Internet, instead of the abundant nonsense. Hope there was list of these websites.
This one is really driving home the scale of the solar system.
Another amazing visualization of distances is the video "Powers of Ten" that goes to the largest and smallest distances. It was filmed in 1977 already but that only adds to its charme:
Only from our point of view. Photons have zero travel time from their perspective (thanks to Einstein). When you go with different speeds, approaching c, you see different distances (and things), and with just 1g acceleration, the same that pulls you down right now, you can go to the stars, galaxies and… well, just watch yourself:
Discussed this with my non-programmer, slightly claustrophobic wife. Thinking about the vastness of space terrifies her, and she feels the same about the vastness of the internet and software. I'd never thought of a codebase as occupying that same kind of physical vastness before.
I remember seeing this page back in the day and always thought it was really funny how it describes itself as being 'A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system' - you scroll over a bit and it points to "1 Pixel" for scale - but the "pixel" it points to is actually two pixels [0].
I'd like to knock up a solar system in a right scale and I wondered how can I do that. Now that I see this article I think I just can't, not in a regular room at least. I guess I will not have my solar system in an accurate scale hung on my ceiling. Too bad
You can always look at the size dimension instead - you can relatively easily have the planets to scale next to each other (As long as you exclude the sun, of course).
Ever since I found out that the planets would fit neatly into the gap between the Earth and the Moon I've been toying with it as a tattoo idea
I wanted to respect the current distances, the sizes and the places of each planet to make it really real. Maybe like here https://theskylive.com/3dsolarsystem
I was thinking of painting the planets myself
It helps that Pluto is no longer a planet but not much.
Uranus is 4.5 billion km from Sun and if, for the sake of simplicity, the model is 4.5m wide, that would mean that Earth with its diameter of ~13000km would be a speck just 0.013mm wide. That should be 1/10th of a single dot at a resolution of 200dpi if you are planning to print a map (one dot at 2000dpi but good luck printing that;). You might want to consider adding an arrow and a label.
There is another one in Hagen in Westfalen, Germany.
Allegedly the first. Sorry, didn't find any english link, but clicking on the 'Virtuelle Tour' there leads you to at least some maps where you can see how it is spread out through the city.
"The next question was — what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward."
It's easy to take a lot of things for granted, but it's amazing that gravity pulls from such a phenomenal distance.
I was just looking at this site earlier today independently of HN. I revisit it several times a year, mainly because I can’t get enough "scale of the universe" comparisons (if you know any good ones, please send them my way).
I especially love the light speed auto-scroll because it does a great job of visualizing just how slow the speed of light is (or how vast space is).
> 1 pixel → · = 3474.8 km ← The diameter of the moon
This seems wrong to me. Would not using area instead of diameter (squaring the circle, as it were) yield a more correct-looking result? As in, the area of one pixel should equal the apparent two-dimensional area of the moon.
One of the most compelling short VR experiences I've tried is Titans of Space PLUS, which gives a tour around the solar system, and then compares our sun to other stars.
The sense of scale when you have depth and head movement had me quaking at a few moments.
Thanks. I love almost any use of Michael Nyman's music, and feel compelled to recommend watching Peter Greenaway's film "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," where a different arrangement and orchestra plays the same piece for a pivotal scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WSFVdQQwhc
On my screen, it's taking about 4s to scroll one light minute (15 times light speed). So if the map extended all the way to Proxima Centauri, it would take over 3 months of continuous scrolling to get there.
Click the little 'C' icon in the bottom right and it will start automatically scrolling at the speed of light (which, spoiler alert, turns out to be pretty slow)
They are indeed the standard symbols for those planets, and they do also coincide with the gender symbols, presumably because of the way the associations played out in classical mythology.
Fun extra fact: in Western alchemy, the symbols for major solar system objects ("planets", even though not all of them are planets by the modern astronomical definition) were also used to represent metals. Except HN seems to delete the symbols when I try to post them, so you'll have to look them up yourself, I guess!
If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21735528 - Dec 2019 (82 comments)
If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790954 - March 2017 (81 comments)
If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217129 - Dec 2016 (11 comments)
If the Moon Was Only 1 Pixel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038584 - July 2016 (4 comments)
If the moon were only 1 pixel: a scale model of the solar system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551423 - April 2014 (17 comments)
If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341690 - March 2014 (178 comments)