Saturday, July 22, 2006

I feel so........... alone

I was checking out a multimedia tour of our solar system (attention Heidi.....), when I read a great description to help with understanding the perspective of size and distance in the solar system:

One way to help visualize the relative sizes in the solar system is to imagine a model in which everything is reduced in size by a factor of a billion. Earth would be about the size of a grape. The Moon would be about a foot from the Earth. The Sun would be about the height of a man and about a city block from the Earth. Jupiter would be the size of a large grapefruit and 5 blocks away from the Sun. Saturn, the size of an orange would be 10 blocks away; Uranus and Neptune - lemons, 20 and 30 blocks away. A human on this scale would be the size of an atom but the nearest star would be over 40,000 km away.

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