Comment by j_m_b

Comment by j_m_b 4 days ago

One of my favorite visualizations of the scale of the solar system is from Stephen Hawking's Genius.

https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/hawking_genius_ep...

It's a hands-on, practical example of how far things are away that we can easily visualize. I highly recommend the rest of the series as well. It's one of the best science shows ever produced. It shows the practical path of scientific discovery. You can watch is on the PBS app, which requires a $60 a year pass. Highly worth it. (I have no affiliation with PBS)

Kuyawa 4 days ago

I've always used this aprox dimensions:

  Sun diam   1,400,000 km
  Eth diam      13,000 km
  Sun dist 150,000,000 km
  Mon diam       3,500 km
  Mon dist     300,000 km

Lets divide it all by 1M. So if the sun is 1.4m in diameter, it would be located 150m from earth which would be 13mm in diameter and the moon would be 3.5mm located 0.3m from earth

Simply put, imagine a yellow beach ball the size of a washing machine located a block and a half away from your house, a blue marble being the earth on one side of your keyboard and a peanut being the moon on the other side

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Kuyawa 4 days ago

Now, using the basketball 24cm (earth) and tennis ball 6.5cm (moon) comparison, they would be separated by 7m in your living room and the sun would be 13m tall (a cherry tree) located at 3km from your house

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socalgal2 3 days ago

Not the same but related? Powers of 10 by Eames

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

Interestingly, that Hawking visualization makes all the same affordances mentioned in the 1 pixel visualization. They show the earth and moon to scale, then the video shows an aerial view with all the planets much too large. Jupiter is 2x the size of the sun. Saturn and its rings 2x that.

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