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Light is incredibly slow, and everything seems out of reach.

I think we'll have a holodeck before we reach another star. And maybe that'll be enough.

Still an extraordinary experience after all these years and possibly the best use of horizontal scrolling I’ve seen. Lots of previous discussions and posts on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=if+moon+only+1+pixel

Shameless plug: Accurate solar system in 192 Bytes:

https://www.dwitter.net/d/26521

The red bit is the sun. 1000 kilometers per pixel, and 1000 seconds per second.

They all fit onto the screen by looking through the orbital plane, as if through a telescope from a distant world, i.e effectively an orthographic projection. The orbits are accurate in terms of mean orbital distance (in reality there is slight perturbance) and sidereal periods.

When I was dabbling with POV-Ray many moons ago, I drew the planets of our solar system to scale with it. You can see it here: https://github.com/susam/pov25#planets

A friend once asked if I couldn't show the planets in orbit rather than lying flat on a plane. I could, of course, but this is ray tracing. What do planets actually look like to human eyes from Earth? Just tiny dots.

If I were to show them in their proper orbits at scale using perspective projection, I'd only be able to render one planet large enough to be visually interesting. The rest would appear as small dots. I didn't want to use an orthographic projection, as it wouldn't reflect how we actually see the universe.

Those were, of course, limitations of a still image. An interactive page like the one in the original post does a fantastic job of conveying the vast scale of our solar system, both in terms of the sizes of the planets and the immense distances between them.

I've seen countless analogies that explain the size of space, but this was really something else. Especially how frustratingly slow the speed of light felt.

Given the great distances and how small the planets seem at that scale, I'm surprised that we can see any of the planets with the naked eye. Thinking about Jupiter, it's 140K km in diameter and about 629M km from Earth. That's a ratio of 1:4500. So imagine a U.S. dime that is 1.8cm in diameter placed 1.8 x 4500 = 8100 cm away. Would you be able to see a dime that it 81m or 266ft away at nighttime, assuming it slightly illuminated? We can see Jupiter, so I guess we should be able to see the illuminated dime too.

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)

Scrolling with mouse scroll wheel a few hundred thousand kilometers at a time is so much work that I gave up :-(

One thing to notice is how small Mercury is, only 1 pixel like the moons that show up. Here's a good photo size comparison. Mercury is smaller that two of the solar system's moon!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary-mass_object#/media/F...

EDIT: And Pluto is smaller than all the moons almost anyone has heard of.

How does all that space out there make you feel about the 30 years of paying off your mortgage for all that 0.25 acres of land you own? ;) J/K

Unrelated, but the Elon dream of getting a human colony on Mars seems beyond imagination. Ignoring safety of such a long travel, the radiation issue of Mar's surface, and the massive infrastructure to have a self-sustainable biosphere (also somehow protected from radiation) to recycle enough oxygen, we still have to deal with the immense number of failures that could happen with no way to send help.

Like, building a fully self-sustainable underwater city or moon base would be far more in reach. It feels that SpaceX should start with prototyping these safer alternatively before overreaching to something 100x more challenging and dangerous.

I just love that this is still online after all these years.

I've seen models like this before. We live in a universe with many, many orders of magnitude. In both directions. Living creatures to small to see, space too big to comprehend.

Mining asteroids for space resources sounds great, right up until you consider the distances involved. Living on Mars - yes, we really should - but you sure aren't going to support a colony long-term from anywhere but local resources.

This makes the Theia hypothesis all the more extraordinary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theia_(hypothetical_planet)

I believe the scientific record is drawing a consensus on this as the moon's origin but the wild sparseness of space just makes this sound really unusual.

This is super cool. It's crazy to think about asteroids in any depiction of the solar system look so packed that I thought a spaceship would never be able to pass through unscathed, but here it's all black because they are basically irrelevant lol

Also crazy how far Jupiter's gravity can keep a moon??

Importantly, the planets aren't actually lined up nicely like on the site. Right now, Mars is ~5 times further then shown.

That's why so many people were taking pictures of Mars back in January, when it was actually possible to take see detail. Right now it just looks like a red orb.

This is truly marvelous! Not only is the horizontal scroll really extra awesome for making me feel the distances...but as others stated, the moment you toggle on the light speed....wow, it really is quite profound! Amazingly done!

I've always thought that people pushing for colonization or even commercial exploitation of space simply don't have a good sense of how far things are and how empty the space between us and those things are.

I love it, I always love these things. Still, given this is a technical site, one small nitpick is that it would be nice on hover to see how many pixels the current object is.

This was so cool I would add the planets as indicators on the right side and by clicking on them I would move the timeline fast to reach them

> We're always trying to come up with metaphors for big numbers. Even so, they never seem to work.

Yeah, that Googol often doesn't work.

The universe is a UI nightmare

It's not space that's big and out of reach, it's just us living too fast.

Love it! Are there stats on how many people scrolled to the end? :)

You may think this page is big. But that's just peanuts to space.

The planets are just grains of sand in a vast empty space.

why have we not shot a probe toward the nearest foreign star?

Wot no Oort Cloud?

I love how simple the HTML/CSS is. Absolute positioning with really large left: values.

    #saturn {
        position: absolute;
        left: 412397px;
        height: 34px;
        width: 65px;
        fill: #ffa043;
    }

Previous discussions (there are many!)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I remember back in elementary school, way before we had such things on computer, we had a vinyl roll for the age of the planet. You'd roll it out in the hallway, starting with present day and watch as the different time periods came into view. You were just a few feet at the origin of man, at the end of the hallway by the time you got to the beginning of Cambrian era, and out the door and across the huge athletic field before you got to the formation of the planet.

Pedantic me : Pluto isn't a planet.

How does this website work? I feel like I'm stuck on the first screen maybe? It says 'scroll to explore' but there are no scrollbars. Does it only work with a mouse with a scroll wheel?

sit back and relax for my 1px review

tedious=true, basicallyLame=true, is1px=false

Look I'm no astronomer, but I'm pretty sure celestial bodies all have elliptical orbits, so if you're going to label something as 'tediously accurate' you should give some indication that the distances from the sun are changing over the orbital period.

I've probably thought about this website daily or weekly since it originally came out. Glad to know it still exists.

I like the other one where you can zoom in/out to planck level or to the unobserved universe

I love the little facts sprinkled throughout

How many times can you go from Beijing to Lisbon ?

Thank you for including Pluto!

Reminds me of a 23 mile long model of the solar system in Madison https://www.astro.wisc.edu/outreach/planet-trek/

nice!

Douglas Adams said it best:

Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.

Lovely

There are many physical scale models of the solar system around the world, many walkable, some bikeable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model

I've seen several, Planet Trek in Wisconsin is a good bikeable one with high quality signage. The sun is downtown, the moon is the size of a peach pit, Pluto is ~20 miles away.

This is a great website—it reminds me of To Scale: The Solar System [1], a mini-documentary where people attempt to build a true-to-scale model of the Solar System. It makes me feel like a tiny speck of dust, floating in the vastness of nowhere...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg

The light speed toggle really hammers home the emptiness. Like, I know that the Earth is ~8 light minutes out, but sitting and waiting 8 minutes for a few pixels to appear when scrolling away from the sun…

> tediously accurate

Could the planets and moons ever all be aligned like this when viewed from an infinite distance?

We’re never going to leave this planet/solar system if we don’t discover FTL (Faster Than Light) travel. Pretty scary if you think about how ridiculously empty is space.

I’ve been thinking about how to teach the size and proportions of the solar system to my kids, I’ve bought a couple of packs of blank RFID cards on which I intend to paint the planets over a starred background. And then walk with my kids the meters necessary to cover the distances before displaying them. What I don’t know is if there is a clever way to use the RFID tech, this website kinda offers an idea.

Related. Others?

If the moon were only 1 pixel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39686916 - March 2024 (1 comment)

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936581 - Sept 2022 (108 comments)

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27573172 - June 2021 (69 comments)

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21735528 - Dec 2019 (82 comments)

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13790954 - March 2017 (81 comments)

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel – A tediously accurate map of the solar system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13217129 - Dec 2016 (11 comments)

If the Moon Was Only 1 Pixel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12038584 - July 2016 (4 comments)

A Ridiculously large accurate scale model of the Solar System - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330303 - Oct 2015 (1 comment)

If the moon were only 1 pixel: a scale model of the solar system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7551423 - April 2014 (17 comments)

If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7341690 - March 2014 (178 comments)

The way I often visualize the solar system is:

If the sun would be the size of a coin, then earth would be around 2m away from it and so small you could barely see it.