10 ms·
If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel
- _dark_matter_ 13y agoAre you kidding me? Sideways scroll with no way to use my scroll wheel? It's choppy and unreadable scrolling using the scrollbar, and using the right arrow is just too slow.
- ndcrandall 13y agoJust a hint shift+scroll wheel in a lot of cases will scroll horizontally.
- werdnapk 13y agoshift+scroll appears to scroll me back and forth in my browser history (Using FF).
- evacuationdrill 13y agoI've always used alt+scroll for horizontal scrolling. Edit: doesn't seem to work on the linked page
- onli 13y agoYep it doesn't. So actually, on chrome, without an autoscroll extension, there is no way to scroll that page (apart from the with the right cursor button, which is way to slow to actually be valid) on a normal desktop pc. Happy new world.
- ToastyMallows 13y agoThanks for that hotkey!
- chrisweekly 13y agoWhat the... Something is wrong with me. I've been paid to work with computers for about 16 years, and somehow I did not know this. Heh. Thank you! :)
- dsego 13y agoSorry you have a shitty computer, or OS, or both.
- kenrikm 13y agoI think it was designed for a Macbook's excellent trackpad. That said, I can see how it would be really difficult to scroll without one.
- motoboi 13y agoThis broke the "two finger right sweep" to return to the previous page (HN). I had to touch the back button on Safari. Felt horrible about that ...
- emehrkay 13y agoI think that is Apple's mistake. I have to go into settings and turn the two finger pref/next pages to three, three finger spaces swipe to four just to avoid the problem you described. And why the hell don't they enable "tab to all controls" by default?
- raverbashing 13y agoYes, still, I only "use" this feature by mistake. especially because it's too easy to make it when scrolling up
- nknighthb 13y agoUsing a trackpad would mean I'm hunched over my laptop trying to destroy my back and neck further than I already have. Designing websites specifically for anti-ergonomic use cases is unwise.
- ultrafez 13y agoDesigning for one thing that's really good in a world of things that are average, isn't the best strategy. Reminds me of "Designed for IE6" and look where that got us.
- bfish510 13y agoI just clicked and held the middle mouse button to move to the right smoothly.
- gpjt 13y agoI kind of felt that the slowness of using the right arrow to scroll was kind of the point. Even holding it down, you're moving significantly faster than light. And it still takes an age to get anywhere.
- Shorel 13y agoMy scroll wheel has sideway tilt. However I just used the navigation icons on the top.
- ColinWright 13y agoThere are no navigation icons showing for me: FireFox 11.0
- fhars 13y agoIt is actually far too fast, several times the speed of light. If you really wanted to realize how vast and empty space is, you should make it scroll slower.
- bennyg 13y agoI think sticking to the speed of light for scrolling transitions would put things even more into perspective (though make the content a little harder to reach haha).
- TuringTest 13y agoBut if you make it realistic - have you thought of the actual size of those letters?
- ardacinar 13y agoshift + scroll wheel works okay, but really, it should have been scrolling vertically. horizontal scrolling doesn't really add anything to the site but inconvenience for the viewer.
- Semiapies 13y agoI just held down my right arrow key.
- emanuelsaringan 13y agoTry tilting your mouse 90 degrees then scroll the wheel towards the left.
- ygra 13y agoMiddle-click on empty space, move the mouse slightly right (or further, depending on the desired speed).
- iamwithnail 13y agoIt was pretty nice on an iPad...
- andyhmltn 13y agoAnnoying but I've just noticed there are icons to 'quick scroll'
- Roboprog 13y agoThe icons are the planetary symbols - e.g. the "female" symbol for Venus, the "male" symbol for Mars, and so on.
- jonhmchan 13y agoThis is very cool - I love demonstrations like this that show the scale of incomprehensible scales. It's always fascinating.
- rwl4 13y agoI agree. This was a beautiful illustration of our solar system. I especially liked the running narrative. ;-)
- acheron 13y ago"were". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood
- ColinWright 13y agoBut this should not use the subjunctive, because he has indeed drawn an image using the scale of the Moon being one pixel wide. This shows it's possible, and hence the subjunctive is inappropriate.
- chimeracoder 13y agoThat's not really correct. Even if we assume that this is no longer a hypothetical/counterfactual case, then the correct grammar is to use the present tense ("This is the moon as one pixel"). But, in this case, it still is counterfactual. This is really short for "If the moon were only [the size of] a single pixel", a statement which we know is not correct. You're probably confusing this with the rule surrounding verifiable facts (ie, "I asked John if he was happy").
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ColinWright 13y agoQuoting from the Wikipedia page: Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred. The action has occurred, it is not an unreality. It seems to me that using the subjunctive would be inappropriate. And yes, perhaps using the present tense would be more appropriate. Certainly I would have used something like: The solar system plotted on a scale where the Moon is one pixel. My comment still stands - the subjunctive is inappropriate. Saying it should be still something else does not make that less true. <Shrug /> It's the interwebs, people will write what they like, and declare that nothing is right, and nothing is wrong, it's all OK. In that case telling someone to use the subjunctive seems doubly inappropriate. https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/
- bunkat 13y agoI tried to use the scrollbar to scroll but I never landed on anything but empty space. While it did perfectly show off the vastness and emptiness of the universe, it probably was not the intended result.
- jostmey 13y agoQuote: "Sorry, Humanity," says Evolution. "What with all the jaguars trying to eat you, the parasites in your fur, and the never-ending need for a decent steak, I was a little busy. I didn’t exactly have time to come up with a way to conceive of vast stretches of nothingness."
- Kenji 13y agoI feel like it's not the vastness we can't comprehend, it's the relation between such "tiny" planets and such big distances that's hard to grasp. You can't zoom out or else you stop seeing the planets, you can't zoom in or else the map gets even larger.
- hrjet 13y agoTo wrap my mind around it, I try to imagine astronomical objects as everyday objects. For example, if Sun was a base-ball in my hand, the earth would be a mote of dust some throwable distance away. My favorite one is: if Sun was the size of a grain of sand, the nearest start would be another grain of sand 30 kms away!
- pantalaimon 13y agorelevant what-if: http://what-if.xkcd.com/83/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/83/
- pkulak 13y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Ob0xR0Ut8
- dorfuss 13y agoI cheated :)
- Wohui 13y agoI used the warp drive console at the top. "Engage"
- silentOpen 13y agoNit: kM -> km; meters are abbreviated 'm', usually.
- narag 13y agoSince this story seems to be nit territory, another one: 'm' is not an abbreviation, but a symbol. That's why you don't write a dot after it.
- danbruc 13y ago1. Nice. 2. Obligatory question - how many working hours were just lost? 3. Why on earth would you use capital M for meters? I really hope I will not look really dumb in a minute, but I immediately knew something was wrong, but it actually took my quite some time to recognize it.
- opminion 13y ago3. Correct, and not knowing anything about the author I would venture that the reason is that he uses imperial in his everyday life, and thus it has been a concession to the wider world to do this in metric, for which I am grateful :-) Citation for "lowercase m for meters": http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec06.html http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec06.html
- bhandziuk 13y agoGreat link! That's my goto for correcting people's units problems. Such a fantastic resource.
- cal2 13y agoI'm American, so I use imperial units in my everyday life. I'm also a (bio)chemist, so I do use metric units about as often as I do imperial units. While I might be slightly biased ("M" is molarity gosh dangit), I don't think I would confuse "M" for "meters (m)" simply because I use imperial units in my everyday life. I bring this up simply because I've seen a few comments over the past few days to the tone of "imperial sucks" and "imperial is clearly inferior." To me, I only see using imperial units as an advantage. As Americans, the metric system is already hammered into our heads in grammar school anyways. Some might see it as Americans being uninformed or accustomed to antiquated methods, but I see it as Americans being able to speak two languages (at least the Americans I'm most familiar with).
- rmc 13y ago"Imperial" in USA is actually not the same as "imperial" in the UK. There are slight differences between all units, but a significant difference with volume. A US gallon and a UK gallon are different by about 25%. The US "imperial" vs UK "imerial" is why during WW2 the Allies (USA, UK, France etc.) used metric. Cause there's only one cenimeter. (Very important when you're making bullets)./
- deadfall 13y agoNice way to see that my computer monitor is very dirty.
- kenperkins 13y agoReally neat. I enjoyed scrolling to earth. After that it became painful. Thankfully, the solution was easy: Open Chrome Inspector Console: $('.essay').css({ left: '20px', marginBottom: '15px', maxWidth: '600px', position: 'relative' }); $('#bigspace').css('left','inherit');
- TomAnthony 13y agoI just used the shortcut buttons at the top. Your solution is more fun. :)
- dpcx 13y agoNeat comparison. But it would be nice if there was something on the initial screen that suggested scrolling. I just thought that a black page locked Safari.
- ryanmcbride 13y agoI had to come read the comments to figure out why I was just seeing a black screen that wasn't scrollable. Sideways scrolling? Really? There's a reason no one uses it.
- chuckwnelson 13y agoWe usually put lengths along an X axis when graphing, I believe this is why horizontal scrolling was used. We also tend to think of our planets in order from left to right from the sun. If this was about ocean depth, vertical scrolling might be more analogous. But its all subjective of course.
- ColinWright 13y agoI have previously wandered along the scale model of the solar system on the St Kilda beach in Melbourne. Yesterday I did the same with the scale model in Bonn. In both cases I only got as far as Uranus. It was interesting along the way to verify Kepler's relationship between the orbital period and the distance. Saturn takes about 30 years to go around, and is about 30^(2/3) ~ 10 times the distance. Jupiter takes about 12 years to go around and is about 12^(2/3) ~ 5.2 the distance. Standing by the plinth with the Earth and the Moon, looking back at the Sun, then forward to Mars, and not being able to see Jupiter really does give a true sense of the scale. Not to diminish this effort, but getting out and walking the distances make a difference.
- mark-r 13y agoWhen I was a kid I wanted to make such a scale model. I think I calculated sizes with Earth = 1 inch, and the distances made the mind boggle. Using a pixel as a unit of measure was pure genius, it makes the model so much more manageable without detracting from the overall grand scale.
- caf 13y agoThere's a scale model of the solar system spread out over hundreds of kilometres across New South Wales, with the Sun at Siding Spring Observatory.
- jon_black 13y agoIf the moon WERE only 1 pixel...you know...because it's not. :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- zrail 13y agoAs I was scrolling through I started to notice a really nice, subtle star background pattern that wasn't moving. I thought that was a really nice touch. And then I touched my monitor and, turns out, it was just dust. There's a metaphor there but I have no idea what it is.
- MattHeard 13y agoI can imagine a dead pixel would be like your spaceship.
- meric 13y agoYou haven't been compelled to touch the dust on your monitor until you thought they were stars.
- ryan 13y agoAnd then you realize the dust is made of stars...
- delinka 13y agoAnd stars, dust. And we are all star-stuff, each of us.
- nrivadeneira 13y agoPlease don't turn HN into Reddit.
- fallinghawks 13y agoThanks for including Pluto (technically not a planet but still one in my mind).
- lmm 13y agoIf one's going to include Pluto it would be nice to have Ceres, which was also cruelly stripped of its planetary status.
- sicher 13y agoHere is another pretty cool solar system scale model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System Some photos here: http://io9.com/5882220/worlds-largest-scale-model-of-the-solar-system-spans-the-length-of-sweden http://io9.com/5882220/worlds-largest-scale-model-of-the-sol...
- cschmidt 13y agoMaine has a scale model solar system about 40 miles across. I drive by it every summer. http://pages.umpi.edu/~nmms/solar/ http://pages.umpi.edu/~nmms/solar/
- sp332 13y agoI remember Bill Nye doing this in one episode. He had the earth as a golf ball, I think? He was running around a soccer field showing the planets. And he drove miles away to show where Pluto would be. Edit: this episode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRIVwGwdxI8#t=250 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRIVwGwdxI8#t=250 Edit2: nope, this one (guess he liked this trick lol) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_OWnlS56rE#t=325 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_OWnlS56rE#t=325 Pluto is only 100 meters away, but Alpha Centauri is 700 km away!
- NortySpock 13y agoActually, in that one, the earth was the size of the ball of a ball-point pen. The sun was the size of a soccer ball.
- JCordeiro 13y agoNicely done! I've always wanted to build something like this, and have never gotten around to it. I can't imagine it would have ended up as good as this.
- Wohui 13y agoSome predecessors, just out of interest: http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/ http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/ This page has been kicking around for ages, not sure how long though. http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/ http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/ More recent. This one is vertical (so whiners can scroll with wheel, although all these pages are scrollable in wheel-click mode)
- fhars 13y agoAnd the dead tree version: http://www.mishkahenner.com/Astronomical http://www.mishkahenner.com/Astronomical
- Florin_Andrei 13y agoWell, you could go outside and do it with marbles and soccer balls: http://florin.myip.org/blog/i-had-no-idea-just-how-big-solar-system-really http://florin.myip.org/blog/i-had-no-idea-just-how-big-solar...
- CanSpice 13y agoAt the 10 million km mark, it says "that was about 10 million kM (621310 mi) just now. Either "mi" is a unit other than miles or the math is wrong (10 million km is about 6.2 million miles).
- sneak 13y ago*were http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ezequiel-garzon 13y agoI'm not a native speaker, but I had the impression this shift to "were" happens less in the UK than in the US. Is that so?
- mathieuh 13y agoI speak British English and it's more a matter of register for me. If I'm writing something formal I'll use the subjunctive, if I'm talking to friends I'll just stick with the indicative. If I saw someone write "it is necessary that he goes" in a paper it would stick out as strange to me, likewise if I heard someone say "it is necessary that he go" it would sound overly formal and a bit stilted. So really, you can use either and be understood perfectly well. It only seems to annoy prescriptivists, and I would say one has a moral obligation to annoy prescriptivists anyway.
- ezequiel-garzon 13y agoThat was a great reply! Thanks for the insight.
- anon4 13y ago> one has a moral obligation to annoy prescriptivists anyway And that's a cause I can really get behind.
- Pitarou 13y ago> one has a moral obligation to annoy prescriptivists anyway. Challenge accepted! (See above.)
- Houshalter 13y ago
- arrrg 13y agoThere is a 1:1 billion scale planet path along the Rhine in Bonn. It makes for a nice Sunday walk (six kilometers from the Sun to Pluto), traversing pretty much the entire city. It seems many other places in central Europe have similar scale models of the solar system, though I’m not sure how common those are in North America.
- lifeformed 13y agoHow big is the Sun model on that walk?
- ColinWright 13y agoJust over a metre, slightly smaller than the one on St Kilda beach in Melbourne.
- PhasmaFelis 13y agoI've heard of at least one in the northeast US. It stretches for some distance along a highway, IIRC. A local water tower was painted as the Sun, and the planets and distances are scaled accordingly.
- mturmon 13y agoThe Sagan walk (he used to teach at Cornell) in Ithaca, NY, is pretty well-known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_Planet_Walk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_Planet_Walk
- adav 13y agoThere's also one of these solar system walks just outside York, UK, if anyone's interested.
- 64598u3wieodsk 13y agoThat sounds wonderful. I am living in Bonn right now, just off the river bank. Might as well use the good weather and explore the path tomorrow :)
- mrmaddog 13y agoSomewhere between Jupiter and Saturn, I had to resort to $(".essay").each(function(i){console.log($(this).text())}); to read the fun little text snippets. I like how it got fairly philosophical—everything eventually turns to philosophy if you are stranded out in space. Thanks for putting this together; it was a nice take on the perspective of our universe.
- Yhippa 13y agoThanks for that line of code. I liked the writing too. It would be nice if there was a compressed mode where you could see the statements and planets without scrolling through space but that would defeat the purpose of showing you the scale of the solar system.
- scott_karana 13y agoI think the author almost needs to include a similar function for end users. There's so much emptiness, it's only natural to eventually crave all the content. (Fits the writing too) Once you scroll for a sufficient period, maybe a little button with the spoilers? :)
- sparkzilla 13y agoOr you could just, y'know, view source.
- neolefty 13y agoSelect all --> copy --> paste into editor works too.
- nacs 13y agoAnd here's the output of that command for those interested: http://pastie.org/pastes/8863556/text http://pastie.org/pastes/8863556/text
- TophWells 13y agoAnd by interested, you mean lazy. Thanks!
- jc_dntn 13y agoShould this not be "If the moon were..."?
- Symmetry 13y agoPluto but not Ceres? That's just discrimination based on historical inequity!
- rlu 13y agodoes the mouse scroll wheel work for you guys? Not for me ... :(
- shmerl 13y agoNice presentation, but the need to stop and read the text breaks the experience. It can be improved so that text could fly alongside the viewer for some time. I.e. so one wouldn't have to stop the flight to read it.
- cwyers 13y agoThis really drives home to me how frustrating it is that Chrome has gotten rid of the OS scrollbar widget on Windows and replaced it with some non-native thing. It's one of several annoyances that are making me think of going back to IE.
- shmerl 13y agoWhy not Firefox?
- marquis 13y ago".. we have to make up mental models and see if they match up to the tiny shreds of hard evidence that actually feel real. The mental models provided by mathematics are extremely helpful when trying to make sense of these vast distances, but still... Abstraction is pretty unsatisfying" Abstraction is where our imagination lights up, where we make art and fall in love and build things. These empty spaces, it's where we find that these brains that evolved to escape Jaguars and find food, are actually pretty amazing in themselves.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Arjuna 13y agoIf you scroll to the end, out beyond Pluto, it says, "Might as well stop now. We'll need to scroll through 6,771 more maps like this before we see anything else." For those curious, after scrolling 6,771 more maps, that is approximately where you would expect to find Proxima Centauri. However, there are actually some other points of interest along the way (between Pluto and Proxima Centauri), including Eris, 90377 Sedna and Voyager 1, to name a (non-exhaustive) few.
- mmanfrin 13y agoOne of the snippets mentioned Sun->Pluto was around 665~ widths, I believe; does this mean the distance from Pluto to Proxima is 10x the width of our planetary system? If so, that is much closer than I thought. I had always held the notion that the nearest solar system was magnitudes greater distance than our own planets (although I admit the distance to pluto from here is pretty damn enormous relative to the distance to other planets in our system).
- sgt101 13y agoNo, I think 6771 *665 widths is close to the truth.
- widdma 13y agoI'm not sure where you went wrong, but your original notion was correct! http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Distance+to+Proxima+Centauri%29+%2F+%28Distance+from+the+Sun+to+Pluto%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28Distance+to+Proxima+...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kjs3 13y agoIf moon = 1 px is your yardstick, then I can see not putting Voyager up there, but otherwise I'm with you. If you stick Pluto in at about 2/3 the size of the moon, no reason not to include Eris (about the same size as Pluto) and the half dozen or so other TNOs that are a half or more the size of Pluto.
- Hannan 13y ago"...or super-powers in a sic[sic]-fi series that you're watching late at night..."
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jmpeax 13y agoThis has the same effect on me as writing out all the zeros in larger numbers, rather than in scientific notation, and then zooming in to see only about 3 zeros at the same time and asking me to scroll through them. Even without the horrible "zoom in", the size loses meaning and I can't tell how big it is, because humans think in logarithmic scales. I can't really estimate the difference in size by glancing at the number of zeros written out for 10^27 or 10^80 (maybe unless they were above and below each other, and then I would say it's between 2 and 3 times difference in orders of magnitude... again logarithmic thinking!). One is the number of atoms in the human body, the other is the number of atoms in the observable universe, so the difference really can't be appreciated by glancing at the number of zeros. Given me logarithmic scales for comparing and estimating sizes any day.
- adnrw 13y agoI found this really helpful insofar as grasping orders of magnitude of big numbers: 1 thousand seconds is 16.7 minutes 1 million seconds is 11.6 days 1 billion seconds is 31.6 years In my mind the difference between a million and a billion seemed somewhat tangible before hearing this. With that comparison, a billion seems so much more.
- lutusp 13y ago> In my mind the difference between a million and a billion seemed somewhat tangible before hearing this. With that comparison, a billion seems so much more. Another way to think about these scaling ratios is to realize that a billion is a thousand times larger than a million. Billion = 10^9 Million = 10^6 9 - 6 = 3. 10^3 = 1000
- Lilme 13y agoThis is major tom to ground control, "Im floating in a most peculiar way."
- acknowledge 13y agoAs someone new to web development, simple creative websites are great inspiration and fun to learn from.
- NAFV_P 13y agoJupiter, yeah right... HN articles are received nearly 35 minutes late.
- romaniv 13y agoFunny. It feels like an adventure game, it illustrates a point, and it's just a static page. I even checked, it works perfectly fine without JavaScript. Great example of what can be achieved with good design. I can't help to mentally contrast this with what people call "web apps" these days that use extremely complicated client-side code to communicate far less interesting things, and often do it badly anyway.
- jgw 13y agoIt did to me, too. It has some of the mood of my all-time favourite piece of Interactive Fiction - heck, of any fiction. Photopia (http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html http://adamcadre.ac/if/photopia.html) It's my hope that one soul, somewhere, will discover this today. That would make me happy. :)
- rafifyalda 13y agoI found this to be a peaceful late-night experience. I put the window to fullscreen to avoid all other distractions, rotated my Magic Mouse 90º, and just smooth scrolled through the story. Really nice.
- pak 13y agoFor a similar visualization of the human genome, and to get a sense of how vast that landscape is, check out this genome browser I made a couple years ago: http://chromozoom.org http://chromozoom.org At the lowest zoom level, one pixel is 280,000 bp (roughly the length of one or two genes, including noncoding segments). You can zoom all the way into the individual base pairs (a, c, t, and g). There is a track below the chromosome cartoon (cartogram) that shows you the genes if you pull down on its label.
- vittore 13y agoGood idea for toilet paper
- vampirebat 13y agoAnother implementation (scroll down instead of to the right): http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/ http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- SeanDav 13y agoDon't know if I should be embarrassed or proud that I manually scrolled all the way past Uranus before giving up! My favourite quote: "... once nothingness becomes tangible, it ceases to exist"
- neves 13y agoSaturn rings should have been draw from an upper view. They would be too thin to display.
- mattquiros 13y agoAnybody else get the feeling that we're probably stuck and will all die here on Earth? While scrolling through all that empty space, I was thinking about interstellar travel. I imagine it'll eventually be as easy and commonplace as we see in sci-fi, but I'm having a moment of doubt we'll ever get there, or if there's any point out-living the home planet.
- Wohui 13y agoI've always felt that way, thanks to the voyagers (37 years and the two little unmanned projectiles have managed to move 16 light hours). My dad always tried to tell me we're just waiting for the next scientific breakthrough. Either way, I think we desperately need to take care of earth; I can't think of an analogy but the earlier we move to take care of earth, the greater the extension to the time we have.
- userulluipeste 13y agoThings have evolved in the meantime and I think with current technology newer unmanned projectiles can be sent to surpass the 37-year old unmanned spacecraft, if that would be a goal. To take those "16 light hours" as a benchmark is not fair.
- userulluipeste 13y agoWell, the humanity has (only what? -) billions of resource-brains (with not much other than) to think and figure out a way to get there! ...and we have a lot of time on our hands (or heads?) for that, so don't loose your hope.
- state 13y agoI can't help it. Everything like this reminds me of Powers of Ten [1]. 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
- rajeemcariazo 13y agoSummary: Most space charts leave out the most significant part – all the space!
- rafeed 13y agoI made it about halfway past Saturn before I gave up scrolling. Nice work. One comment: If you're using km for the distance units, you might as well stick with it (metric) for all the other examples like 75 mi/hr and 475 ft to be more consistent. Better yet, an option to switch the units between imperial and metric would be pretty cool.
- zoobert 13y agoreally cool. Nice work love it. Will show it to my son
- jmnicolas 13y agoNow I understand why going to Mars is such an expedition. If real karma exists, the author deserves a good dose !
- lmm 13y agoIf you want to get an intuitive feel for the orbital mechanics I highly recommend Kerbal Space Program.
- K0nserv 13y agoToo much time was spent on this last night, but here it is http://jsfiddle.net/yrFK4/ http://jsfiddle.net/yrFK4/
- Thiz 13y agoPlace an orange on the floor, ten feet (3m) away place a cherry. Earth and moon. Walk away a thousand yards (1km) and place a 30ft (10m) high pumpkin. That's how big the sun is and how far it is from us. * aprox scale
- userulluipeste 13y agoIt's ironic to read «The brain isn't built to handle "empty."» remark having «How to meditate» (that aims to empty your mind/thoughts) on HN front-page.
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y agoMy friend pointed out: "When pressing the right arrow key, the digits at the bottom are spinning really fast apart from the most significant numbers at the front and the 3rd digit from the right which, curiously, slowly counts backwards without missing any digit"
- stcredzero 13y agoBack in the late 70's, when I was in grade school, I used to make maps with just about the same scale with rolls of my dad's thermal printer paper.
- aamirabro 13y agoLog scales are for quitters, relevant xckd: http://xkcd.com/1162/ http://xkcd.com/1162/