I actually ran into this problem in grad school. I was trying to simulate an optical phased array with a target at the moon, it turns out that a single bit of a

I actually ran into this problem in grad school. I was trying to simulate an optical phased array with a target at the moon, it turns out that a single bit of a double is about 1 wavelength of light at the distance of the moon. I ended up doing most of the calculations symbolically and only using floats for the differences in the distances between each beam which was enough to get out of the solar system but not out of the galaxy...