*The mean distance of course. Planets orbit in ellipses. I’m torn between not including that fact because it’s obvious, vs. not wanting to be corrected.
**I also wanted to add some yardsticks along the way, like counting off the light-minutes between the Earth and the Sun, but to be honest this image was straining the abilities of my laptop and Adobe Photoshop all at once. (You did see Venus & Mercury though, right?) It actually took a few tricks even to save the thing out and get it online.
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Love it. Thanks.
very thanks!! ;]
Cool graphic. I have a mouse with hyper-scroll (free spinning scroll wheel – logitech), so I essentially just traveled an AU through a wormhole. Took me 10seconds by constant spinning.
Tagbadger, if only we could harness one tenth of your mouse-wheel’s power, we could get our asses to Mars.
Nice
What next? Nearest star? 
Wouldn’t it have been easier to make a repeating background image equivalent to .01au, and just loop, excepting for the planets and the sun?
Probably Matt! Did it give you problems loading though? Thought I got the file sizes small enough.
No, I had no problems loading it at al. It looks great, and definitely gives the feeling of isolation
Next time just split the big image into multiple small images, edit the images individually, and then tile them on the webpage.
Hey Silas, that’s sort of what I did. There’s a spacer image (of just stars) that’s repeated.
This is brilliant! We’re such a long scroll from the sun
Whoa, this is great! Thanks, Brad!
Hey Jamie! Been awhile! Yeah, back to the well for me – just figure out some way to illustrate the size of things and the internet comes a’ runnin’?
You’ve tapped into what the internet really wants! All we want is scale! Seriously though, keep up the great work.
Thanks Jamie. Still always remember your kind words from last time – maybe my fave comment ever. Now off to compare a grain of rice to the local group!
This is excellent. One of the best ways to show people the absolute vastness of space. And to think this is just 1 AU and that the Solar System is way bigger and the Milky Way Galaxy is infinitely bigger should educate some people. Thanks for your efforts.
@Brad, Wow, I’m honored. I still refer to that Scale video all the time. It’s one of my favorite internet things. : )
Great visualisation
Btw i was curious how many AU is 4,3 ly so … (with help of google calc)4,3 light year = 271 930,588 Astronomical Unitswhich [omg] means almost 271931x longer picture 
I friggin’ love you, man. Great stuff!!!
That was kind of neat. I saw comment Brad posted on a page about quacks and figured I’d click through and see his site.
Hey Terry, that wouldn’t be Sci-ence, would it? Maki & Nadir and I go way back! They’re my skeptical home-dogs.
http://sci-ence.org/ that is folks, check it out!
Brad it was the sci-ence.org page with the graphic about healers.. PZ myers linked to it. http://sci-ence.org/the-telltale-quack/I'm not so much into skeptics as in how people behave to belong to communities. The jargon, and the dogma are fascinatingWhile it’s interesting and entertaining to look at others, I think the real goal is learning not to fall into the pattern myself. Some of my friends are into NLP, but while they seem to be making progress, I think they’re just falling into a new dogma.
Wow, longer than I thought!
Tim: Probably because it took you less than 8,32 minutes to think about it…
where’s mercury?!
This was an enormous project! I applaud you for even trying to do it! I went to the end and read your additional comments and the first of them got me to thinking. Could you show the Earth, Venus and Mercury at both the apogee and perigee positions to show everyone the range of ellipse in the orbits of these planets? For example, start out showing Earth’s position, relative to the Sun, as far away as it gets and then again in relative position at it’s closest approach. Then repeat that with the other two as well. This would add some contrast and show people something no one else has done. I do believe everyone else has only picked the median orbital path to represent each planet’s orbit. Just an idea!
Jim
@Zodark Tsk tsk tsk. Somebody got impatient and scrolled too fast. Mercury is there my friend, have another look.@Anthony It’s a GOOD idea! It brings up an interesting question about who these sorts of visualizations are designed to talk to. My mission is always to bring an appreciation for science and the natural world to those who previously didn’t stop to notice, so I try not to include too much detail; but you’re right that it would be interesting to show.Given the way I like to do things, I’d prefer to do some sort of separate visualization that describes apogees and elliptical orbits, rather than dilute the singular impact of this one.Thanks to everyone for the feedback!
apologies…
nice work
<html> <head> <style><!– .hmmessage P { margin:0px; padding:0px } body.hmmessage { font-size: 10pt; font-family:Tahoma } –></style> </head> <body class=’hmmessage’><div dir=’ltr’> I can see that being a concern from your POV. And I’m certainly not unconscious of the fact that you’re focused on delivering science at that level. <br> I’ve been into Astronomy for more than 40 years so that’s how I was able to take what you did and extrapolate. It’s always been a piece of information rattling around in my brain ever since viewing the first elementary wire and plastic solar system model in grade school. It was just at that moment I got the mental nudge from your model to even consider the idea of someone, for once, actually showing the total perturbation and range of the major celestial orbits. <br> Having said all this it dawns on me that I wish I knew more about programming, or whatever it was you used to build and display your model, so that I could attempt this project on my own.<br> Once again though, I wish to congratulate you on getting this out on the web for people to see. You are having an effect on people and their ideas, and as an educator, I’d find knowing that would have me feeling like the time and effort that went into the project was well spent! <br> Thank you for replying to my comment and for doing so so promptly. Usually, I never hear back from my posts and since I’m finding these things through StumbleUpon, I’m sure to almost never see those sites again.<br><br>Respectfully Yours,<br>J. Anthony Carter<br><br><br> </div></body> </html>
The comment about harnessing the mouse wheel to get to Mars. Was literally the funniest thing I have heard.LMAO You are my hero.
@Aydin, glad to meet somebody who shares my sense of humour… we’re rare.
Wow – that really makes me ponder how amazing it is that the handful of pixels representing Earth contains billions of minds capable of pondering this scale from an abstract perspective. Humanity truly is the pinnacle of creation/evolution (whatever one’s cup of tea is). We ROCK. It’s sad how we suck sometimes.This paradigm shift reminds me of a science project I did with my daughter for Grade 5: we wondered what the Big Dipper would look like from the "side." We researched the distances of the seven component stars and plotted their relative distance from Earth, and represented it via foam balls on wire so she’d have a 3D model for her to take to school. I took some pics: http://convert-man.blogspot.com/2011/02/big-dipper-science-project.htmlThanks for this informative post; I’ll stay tuned!
Thanks @JamesVKautz Great idea for the project. Made me think of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=dR52RulV9i4#t=331s
@JamesVKautz And I agree. I hear lots of people devalue who we are and what we’re capable of. It’s unfortunate. I just hope our incredible abilities don’t bring about our demise.Look for a future post on the ‘great filter’, an idea that seems more compelling the more I think about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
This is awesome. The sun is an amazing star.
great effort
omg that is a very long distance cab ride
cliff notes please.
@Nitin: Sun is far.
…….but how long would it take a neutrino to travel that distance?
@Rosemary – well that’s big question, isn’t it? (but probably not faster)
Is the radius of the sun correct for this scale? I would’ve thought there’d be less apparent curvature.
Perhaps not Rick – just did a quick model in PS and came up with this.http://i.imgur.com/Y8QfM.jpgLooks like the curvature would be less pronounced.
I have seen it! The trick is always to come up with new ways to help people conceptualize the unfathomable. We didn’t evolve any native sense of these scales.Again, when looking at things like this, there really is no difference between a bacterium and a blue whale.
Very good presentationI appreciate your creative way to illustrate (?? illuminate ??) the distanceSo that people can "see and feel" the Solar System distances I ask each person to take one sheet of regular (8 1/2 x 11) copier paper and do the following: On one side in the middle place a tiny dot and label it ‘Sun’ — turn the paper over and on the second side place the teeniest dot possible and label it ‘Earth’ — now hold the paper at eye level and look at the thickness of that one sheet — that is one Astronomical Unit with the planets Mercury & Venus within the thickness — I then proceed to ask how many sheets of paper will it take to stack one atop another to demonstrate the distances to our Solar System planets (4 more sheets for Jupiter, another 5 for Saturn, et cetera — anyway, the demonstration continues (1 light year is a stack of paper 20 feet tall — Alpha Centauri’s stack is 90 feet tall — If you want I would be glad to send the worksheet to you — You keep up your creativity
This is a wonderful creative visual way of explaining the distance to the sun. I love it. I have seen some great apps for the tablet, but this is as good as anything else I’ve seen so far.
Too bad light years, or in this case minutes, are not a unit of speed, it’s a unit of time. Now, if we were to use the speed of light (299 792 458 m / s) that would be correct. Really needs to be rewordedOther wise fantastic.
I think you have me confused with George Lucas sir (or Madame), talking about making Kessel runs in how many parsecs and what not.
Actually, the light year is not a measure of speed OR time, but of distance. It’s the DISTANCE that light travels in a year.And in any case, this is what I said:-You’ve just travelled this many Kms.-It takes light 8 mins to go that far. (and light just so happens to move at light speed)-At that speed (again, light speed) it would take 4 years to get to the closest star.Perhaps I’m missing something, but I never mentioned light years, so I can’t see how I misused the term. However if I’m wrong let me know.
And @Warren, I apologize I didn’t reply to your very informative comment. Please do! me@bradblogspeed.com
I think I damaged my mouse’s scroll wheel just now. @Brad Goodspeed Sun is VERY far
I just performed something that really hits home the distances represented here. Starting from the Sun, I used the up arrow on my keyboard and didn’t let go until I got to Earth. I timed it on a stopwatch. It took about 7 minutes, 35 seconds, which is a slightly fast approximation of the speed of light. What I’ve realized is this: compared to this scale, light is SLOW. The very apex of technology in science fiction is light speed travel. But even at that impossible speed, travel between the stars can be compared to rowing around the earth in a rowboat, but slower. If you really want a feel for how vast even our tiny solar system is, try what I did.
@That Man – Very nicely stated.I think about that as well, that travelling 300,000 kilometers in a single second, which is the fastest that anything can go, really gets you nowhere. And the calculations regarding the amount of energy required for human beings to travel at even near that speed are staggering. (good read about that here http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/?p=1217 )Which leads me to the somewhat pessimistic gut-hunch that man will never travel to the stars. (although even though it would be millennia after I’m gone, I hope I’m wrong)But that instant of realization that you described having is powerful. In those fleeting moments we grasp the true scale of space, something we didn’t evolve a sense for, and it can’t help but shape our outlook. Like Sagan repeated: "It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.It’s the one way we CAN interact with the Cosmos; that is to know it. Or to do our very best to try to know it. To let these grand concepts into our head, something we can do with no more than a little imagination and an up-arrow. Thanks for your comment. It made me smile.
Sorry, I must not have expressed myself clearly. It’s not that you misused any terms, just feel that the way it is worded would give people with less knowledge on the subject the wrong impression.
Great way to put things in perspective. Thanks.
Very cool, but why do you pass stars on the way down? The parallax of the stars would be unnoticeable on that scale.
What the heck!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?it’s so far
And it can still give you a sunburn… that’s what trips me out. Imagine the raw power of something that, even at that enormous distance, you can feel on your face.
So crazy! I absolutely love things like this that put it in a simple (if you can call it that) perspective
That’s about the size of my penis.
Amazing!
so gay i fucking asked for more and now my dick hurts. TITS OR GET THE FUCK OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! you faggots make me sick OBAMA for life!
wow this was great and cool i hope you do another one again