{"id":1031,"date":"2012-09-06T08:19:01","date_gmt":"2012-09-06T06:19:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/?p=1031"},"modified":"2012-09-11T07:17:24","modified_gmt":"2012-09-11T05:17:24","slug":"a-little-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/2012\/09\/a-little-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"A little perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw a picture <\/a>of solar flare this morning comparing it to the size of the Earth. Years ago as a kid I used some old mainframe stream paper to ‘draw’ the solar system at scale (1\/1 000 000 000 000). That really puts the whole solar system into perspective (about 9 meters long to fit Pluto on furthest point). The following things could\/can be observed using stuff at this ‘scale’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Scale 1:1 000 000 000 000<\/caption>\n
Object<\/th>\nDescription<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n
The Sun<\/td>\nA little ball of 1 millimeter in diameter<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Earth<\/td>\nwould be 15 centimeters away from the sun (Moon about 0.4mm away from Earth)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Jupiter<\/td>\nabout 0.8 meters away (and 0.15mm in diameter)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Saturn<\/td>\nabout 1.3 meters (rings about 0.2mm in diameter)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Neptune<\/td>\nabout 4.5 meters<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Pluto<\/td>\naround 6 meters (average, varies from 4.4m to about 7.3m)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Voyager 1<\/td>\nis about 18 meters away<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
1 light year<\/td>\nis about 11 kilometers away (10.8km)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Proxima Centauri (The closest star)<\/td>\nwould be about 45 kilometers away!<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Sirius (The brightest star)<\/td>\nabout 93 kilometers away!<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Betelgeuse<\/td>\nabout 6940 kilometers away! (diameter roughly 1 meter estimate)<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Alnilam (Epsilon Orionis, middle star of the Orion belt)<\/td>\nabout 14 000 kilometers away<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The largest star known (estimated)<\/td>\nhas a diameter of about 1.5 meters<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Milky way galaxy diameter<\/td>\nabout 1 000 000 kilometers!<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Andromeda galaxy<\/td>\nabout 24 000 000 kilometers away!!<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Speed of light<\/strong><\/td>\nabout 1 meter per hour<\/strong>!!!<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Kinda put things into perspective – especially the speed of light
\n\"Earth<\/p>\n

Image Credit: NASA\/GSFC\/SDO<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw a picture of solar flare this morning comparing it to the size of the Earth. Years ago as a kid I used some old mainframe stream paper to ‘draw’ the solar system at scale (1\/1 000 000 000 …<\/p>\n

Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,13],"tags":[234,237,236,233,60,61,235],"class_list":["post-1031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting-stuff","category-thoughts","tag-astronomy","tag-comparison","tag-facts","tag-scale","tag-science","tag-space","tag-speed-of-light"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1034,"href":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions\/1034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hen.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}