If the moon were only 1 pixel: A tediously accurate solar system model (2014)

Make sure you press the "c" button in the bottom right. 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.

As 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.

That is a fantastic visualization to get a feeling of the scales involved. It reminds me a lot of the "planet trail" next to Zurich, Switzerland, a trail with scale models of the sun and the planets [1]. The sun is about 1m in diameter. The earth is about 1cm in diameter, 100 or 200m away. Pluto is more than 3km down the path. Walking down that trail was the first time I realized how empty the solar system really…

Neat! My favorite way to show the impossibly large scale of our universe: http://spaceengine.org/. Set your speed to 10 light years per second and watch the Andromeda galaxy just sit there. Also fun to see how slow even the speed of light is. Start at the sun and head for earth. Once you reach Earth marvel at how fast you had been going. Head towards Jupiter and, once again, marvel at how impossibly slow your going compared to even the…