| DEVELOPMENT DRAFT The only stable URL is http://www.vendian.org/howbig/. Comments encouraged - mncharity@vendian.org (Mitchell Charity) |
How Big Are Things?
|
small | Real world |
big | solar system | between | galaxy | ||||||||||||||||||||
| nano |
micro |
meter |
kilo |
Mega |
Giga |
Tera |
Peta |
Exa |
||||||||||||||||||
| Petameter's Room - looking at a sheet of graph paper |
|
look at the entire room |
|
| galaxy | 21 | |
| 20 19 | ||
| local stars | 18 | |
| 17 16 | ||
| between | 15 | |
| 14 13 | ||
| E's orbit | 12 | |
| 11 10 | ||
| sun | 9 | |
| 8 7 | ||
| texas | 6 | |
| 5 4 | ||
| hood | 3 | |
| 2 1 | ||
| you | 0 | |
| -1 -2 | ||
| salt grain | -3 | |
| -4 -5 | ||
| bacteria | -6 | |
| -7 -8 | ||
| atom | -9 |
We entered our local interstellar cloud a few thousand years ago, and are now near the edge, heading outbound into an nearby cloud.
| light-years ( ly) | ||||||||||
| parsecs (pc) | |||
sz
planetary nebulas

source Drawn with perspective - vertical measure is 1/4 of the horizontal measure.

from Nelson Cunnington's Starmaps
Here are the stars in a 20 ly ball around the sun. These color blobs are, of course, way to big to be stars - the blob size indicates height. We are looking down at the galactic disk.

[ Image courtesy of Winchell Chung of
3-D StarMaps. ]
In this view... Basically, BD is ~5cm towards you, Sun/Barnard's/Wolf are ~on the screen, and the others are ~3cm behind it.
There are some stereo pairs here.
Other Worlds, Distant Suns has a
The 65 Nearest Star Systems VRML
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