DEVELOPMENT DRAFT The only stable URL is http://www.vendian.org/howbig/. Comments encouraged - [email protected] (Mitchell Charity) |
How Big Are Things?
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small | Real world
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big | solar system | between | galaxy | ||||||||||||||||||||
nano
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micro
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meter
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kilo
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Mega
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Giga
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Tera
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Peta
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Exa
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Petameter's Room - looking at a sheet of graph paper |
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look at the entire room |
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galaxy | 21 | |
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20 19 | ||
local stars | 18 | |
17 16 | ||
between | 15 | |
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14 13 | ||
E's orbit | 12 | |
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11 10 | ||
sun | 9 | |
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8 7 | ||
texas | 6 | |
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5 4 | ||
hood | 3 | |
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2 1 | ||
you | 0 | |
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-1 -2 | ||
salt grain | -3 | |
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-4 -5 | ||
bacteria | -6 | |
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-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) | ||||||||||
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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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