To specify: Aborted due to pain in my right hand while scrolling. I did get a CT scan of that hand due to a sporting accident, though, and it got better a few weeks later.
Also, my OS usually allows me to change line skips per mouse wheel increment to three quarters of a page. That does not seem to work here.
Agreed, my other mouse is free-scrolling, it would be fun to scroll huge distances (IN SPACE!) there.
I initially found none of the helpers that scroll somewhere, but thanks for all the tips here and in other replies.
There's a "light speed" button at the bottom (only worked when I disabled anti tracker mode in my browser) that will scroll for you at the equivalent of light speed. No tired fingers!
The downside is that you'll be waiting 4:47:50.88 to reach Pluto.
Alternatively, there's a planet browser on the top, but that kind of "cheating" kind of diminishes the point of the website.
Personally, I would've liked the website to scroll vertically instead. Shift+scroll isn't difficult, but it's a trick many people don't know about so relying on it (or on a touch screen, or a scroll bar at the bottom that completely defeats the sense of scale that scrolling leaves behind) is a bit annoying.
A tip - hold down the middle mouse button down and move your mouse around. It's scroll speed is variable dependent on how far your mouse is away from the origin point, so it's quite useful.
You can clear the entire screen in around 15 seconds if you go max speed!
For Linux users, browsers disable this behavior by default because it interacts weirdly with middle click paste. To enable on Firefox) search "autoscroll" in settings, Chrome) run with `--enable-blink-features=MiddleClickAutoscroll` (also there's an extension for it if anyone finds the message shown at start annoying).
Maybe if it was recently resubmitted and already had a discussion (usually a mod will mark the newer as dupe) or recently submitted multiple times without getting attention (since at this point it becomes spam). But if recent submission was long time ago (so older thread is basically archived), it makes sense to be submitted anew.
The photo doesn't do it justice tho. Just like a photo of the full Moon low on the horizon doesn't look anywhere close to what my eyes are seeing. Now imagine a full moon, with a diameter roughly 4 times as big, that's how big the Earth is looking back from the moon. North America itself is the size of the full moon. Pretty wild to think about.
That everything is so empty is the aspect of the universe that I find most surprising.
This also holds for small things like atoms. They are mostly empty space, too. And for bigger things like galaxies.
Most other aspects seem to be "good" choices. Like limiting the speed of things. The way it is limited (as described by special relativity) is even really elegant. The uncertainty as described by quantum theory and how it is coupled to the observer is downright cool. I often think "Yes, if I made a universe from scratch, this seems like a nice choice to go with".
But that everything is so empty? I would not have made that choice, I think.
> I often think "Yes, if I made a universe from scratch, this seems like
> a nice choice to go with".
One interpretation of that thought: All the universes that were not so elegant, collapsed quickly or did not develop life, or did not develop life as complex as us. We are here, living and complex, in _this_ universe because _this_ universe is so elegant.
It may look empty to human eyes but there’s actually a lot going on in “empty space”. Aside from physical objects that are just too small to detect from Earth (small asteroids (some gravitationally bound to the sun, others just passing through), dust, fragments of ancient collisions, gas, isolated molecules, and hydrogen and helium leftover from the formation of the solar system), there is also the ever-blowing solar wind - particles from the sun heading outwards - and a hailstorm of photons emitted from far off sources (other stars and galaxies, nebulae, pulsars, the extreme red-shifted radiation of distant energetic events… and much much more), passing through allowing us to see the rest of the universe. On top of these natural sources of EM radiation, our solar system at least tingles with human-created radio waves. Empty space also vibrates with gravitational waves, which we are only just starting to be able to detect. We theorise that any remaining emptiness might actually be boiling over with the continual creation and destruction of virtual particles. And who knows what’s going on with dark matter?
Related: I find it annoying that we went through the trouble of downgrading Pluto, but we still count any rock that orbits a planet as a moon. If planets have 69 moons, then it becomes tedious and I quickly lose interest in learning about them. I wish there was a definition that included our moon (obviously), made sure that Mars has at least one moon, but limited the number of moons that Jupiter and Saturn have to a handful.
Criteria could include: size or weight relative to the planet, distance to the planet, apparent size in the sky.
According to this website, there are dozens of "moons" that orbit 10 to 20 million of kilometers away from Jupiter and have diameters between just 1 and 10 km. It's time for a change of nomenclature!
I'm happy that we're finding ever more exoplanets! I remember, as a kid, that there was speculation as to whether they even existed.
I'm less happy about the moon inflation in our solar system. It's pointless. I honestly find the claim that Jupiter has 79 moons misleading. A 1 km rock orbiting 20 million kilometers away, really? It's so far removed from what our moon is that we should not be using the same word to describe it. It's fine to call it a satellite.
Either Pluto is a planet and Eris and Haumea and Makemake and Sedna and.... are too or you let go of what they taught you in elementary school and be fine with the dwarf planet designation.
I saw a Twitter post the other day showing the orbit of planets in the solar system that included Ceres. There were tons of replies saying "What's Ceres? Did they discover a new planet?"
People would probably have a better idea about our solar system if we taught them that we don't know how many planets are in the solar system, and told them we were going to have some extra focus on the 8 largest (or 13 largest, or 7, wherever you want to draw the line).
The IAU definition of planet (which wasn't the original proposal, and which most planetary scientists don't seem to follow) appears to be a conservative attempt to keep the number as close to the "traditional" number as possible, even if it leads people into having an overly simplistic conception of our solar system. And it leaves us with a loose definition that specifically states it only applies to our solar system, and doesn't apply anywhere else in the universe.
But seriously I always "knew" in the back of my mind that the universe is huge. But to have to wait 8+ minutes to scroll from Sun to Earth at the speed of light gives a new earth-shattering perspective.
What’s really bizarre is from what I understand is those photons spend something between 10,000 and 170,000 years bouncing around colliding with stuff inside the sun. From there it takes a mere 8 minutes to get to earth. [0]
Technical nitpick (but HN loves these) - the gas and ice giant planets do emit photons, in the infrared, where the energy comes from gravitational compression. Neptune in particular emits 2.4x as much energy as it receives from the sun.
The fastest travel speed we can really understand is about the speed of sound (jet travel), most westerners have travelled at that speed.
At jet speed it takes best part of a month just to get to the moon, to get to the sun takes 17 years. To reach Neptune you’d have to have left about the same time Columbus visited America.
>The fastest travel speed we can really understand is about the speed of sound (jet travel), most westerners have travelled at that speed.
To be pedantic, no, not really. Commercial jets can travel at speeds up to 955 kilometres per hour (593 mph) (per wikipedia). The speed of sound is roughly 1235 kph (767 mph). Also note that commercial jets usually travel slower than their maximum speed to save fuel.
Please note that if you want to read all of the blurbs of text visible between the planets, you need only to view the source of the page. They're just divs, and it saves you a large amount of scrolling.
Space is big. Space is empty. We are nothing to space.
There's a walk somewhere in the east of Netherland that I did with my kids a while ago, where you walk through a scale representation of the solar system. You start with Pluto (it's an old walk), then walk a very long time before you meet Neptune, then again a very long time before you come across Uranus. That's already a major part of the walk right there. Then the planets start coming quicker, and the last 10 meters or so is the inner solar system. And after that is the radio telescope array at Westerbork.
It really gives a good feel for the massive difference in distances between the inner and outer solar system. I strongly recommend it to anyone who is in that vicinity.
My town in France has this as a riverside walk, spread over 5 km into the next towns. Well, my hometown has the inner system over a few hundred meters, then it's vast emptyness over the next 5km :)
My college had a similar installation, with the inner solar system on the walls of the physics/astronomy building and the other planets scattered about the campus at appropriate distances. But my favorite part was the plaque that said that somewhere in Alaska was the final piece of the installation: a scale model of the nearest star.
For the scale model in Alaska to really sink in for your story, it would have helped to know where your college was located. If your college was in the Yukon would be one thing, but if your college was in Miami that would be totally different.
That might not help without the size of the astronomy building, the size of the models, or how long the walk was to the nearest star.
Here are some approximate dimensions. In Miami the sun would be 9in or 22cm[1], the inner solar system could be depicted on a line 120ft or 35m[2] long, and Pluto would be about 1000yds or 1km[3] away.
Divide by two if the university is in San Francisco, which is about 2000 miles away from Anchorage rather than 4000. Or divide by ten if the university is in Alaska and the nearest star's model is only 400 miles away.
There is a similar thing (but at reduced scale) in the "Cité de l'Espace" in Toulouse, France. Just liek this site (old but gold), it really helps you to put things into perspective.
Just want to say that I loved going there as a kid. The distances were very educative. They also had a 1kg (I think) block of iron that you could lift, and you could then try what it'd feel like with the gravitation of the different planets.
Caherdaniel, Kerry, Ireland, in a dark sky preserve [1] has a "Walk of the Planets" [2] along the Kerry Way hiking trail where both the planets and distance between them (3.5kms) are to scale. It's a really interesting way to see the relative size of the planets and the distance between them.
Sounds like a scale of 1:1,000,000,000 so the Earth is 150m from the Sun, Mars is 75m further, and Pluto somewhere around 6km. That's the same (mind boggling) scale as our local one - and to complete the picture you can put a toothpick 23.585km from the sun and move it every day 147cm further from the sun. A 20nm fleck on the tip of the toothpick is then Voyager 1 represented on the same scale.
Sweden has a permanent one. The inner planets are in Stockholm while the outer planets are across the rest of Sweden.
There was a touring one that was in Cambridge (UK) recently and we thoroughly enjoyed walking it even if the walk to Pluto was quite far. Walking it in reverse order would have been better, perhaps. Didn't think of that.
You know what I got the education I got, I memorized that, there was little new information making it a non-planet. You know those same guys call carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen metals? It's a description. In astronomy, metal means anything greater than hydrogen and helium. Every element but the first two. Change of nomenclature, really, and I guess motivated because of seeing other planetary systems.
The entire Solar System is highly aberrant. Single star, instead of binary star. Then, a moon around earth, very large moon, besides, it is the same size in the sky (varying over time) as the sun, leading to different eclipses (like anular eclipses, which accurately measured a biblical event 4000 years ago, to the day, I think it was a Tuesday). Like everything is very unique, apparently.
I remember an episode of Fetch! With Ruff Ruffman on PBS where one of the challenges was to build a scale model of the Solar System by placing planets on the sidewalk. The kids had to walk for miles to get it to scale. My at-the-time 12 y/o brain was blown
In Sweden, there is a scale replica of the solar system, with correct distances. The sun is represented by the Avicii Arena, the world's largest spherical building. http://www.swedensolarsystem.se/
As a German speaker "was" is especially awful sounding because we have the exactly analogous "wäre" (conditional, instead of "war" which means "was") which also sounds very similar.
I've had people try to "correct" my use of subjunctive... which truly saps my will to live.
What’s wild about this is trying to imagine those scales when you remember how absolutely huge the earth is relative to each of us.
If you haven’t done this before, go out into the desert or canyons or the Hoover dam (in the U.S.) and experience viscerally how tiny each of us is relative to nature.
Trying to hold that in my mind while also conceptualizing the distance to Mars, or the size of the sun … I can’t do it!
What I love about that site when you combine it with 1 pixel = 3478 km.
If you drove 88km an hour it would take you almost 40 hours to drive across 1 pixel!
Our solar system is big big big.
I used to do the math with my kids when they were young and first found out about division. My story would be lets drive to the moon. And then we would figure out how far it was and how fast we could drive.
110 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/zR3Igc3Rhfg
Also, my OS usually allows me to change line skips per mouse wheel increment to three quarters of a page. That does not seem to work here.
Agreed, my other mouse is free-scrolling, it would be fun to scroll huge distances (IN SPACE!) there.
I initially found none of the helpers that scroll somewhere, but thanks for all the tips here and in other replies.
The downside is that you'll be waiting 4:47:50.88 to reach Pluto.
Alternatively, there's a planet browser on the top, but that kind of "cheating" kind of diminishes the point of the website.
Personally, I would've liked the website to scroll vertically instead. Shift+scroll isn't difficult, but it's a trick many people don't know about so relying on it (or on a touch screen, or a scroll bar at the bottom that completely defeats the sense of scale that scrolling leaves behind) is a bit annoying.
You can clear the entire screen in around 15 seconds if you go max speed!
If the moon is a single pixel, how is it shown as a half moon
Shouldn't it be a single dot/pixel?
Imagine how glorious and huge the Earth must look like from the Moon.
https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1...
and https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_6...
I would have linked to the 'Blue Marble' picture but that was taken mid-flight rather than from the moon itself.
This also holds for small things like atoms. They are mostly empty space, too. And for bigger things like galaxies.
Most other aspects seem to be "good" choices. Like limiting the speed of things. The way it is limited (as described by special relativity) is even really elegant. The uncertainty as described by quantum theory and how it is coupled to the observer is downright cool. I often think "Yes, if I made a universe from scratch, this seems like a nice choice to go with".
But that everything is so empty? I would not have made that choice, I think.
You?
Not quite so simple, see: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/126512/why-doesn...
You thought scrolling was slow? Wait until you experience the solar system at the actual speed of light.
I'm pleased he still loves Pluto.
Criteria could include: size or weight relative to the planet, distance to the planet, apparent size in the sky.
https://theplanets.org/moons/
I'm less happy about the moon inflation in our solar system. It's pointless. I honestly find the claim that Jupiter has 79 moons misleading. A 1 km rock orbiting 20 million kilometers away, really? It's so far removed from what our moon is that we should not be using the same word to describe it. It's fine to call it a satellite.
People would probably have a better idea about our solar system if we taught them that we don't know how many planets are in the solar system, and told them we were going to have some extra focus on the 8 largest (or 13 largest, or 7, wherever you want to draw the line).
The IAU definition of planet (which wasn't the original proposal, and which most planetary scientists don't seem to follow) appears to be a conservative attempt to keep the number as close to the "traditional" number as possible, even if it leads people into having an overly simplistic conception of our solar system. And it leaves us with a loose definition that specifically states it only applies to our solar system, and doesn't apply anywhere else in the universe.
But seriously I always "knew" in the back of my mind that the universe is huge. But to have to wait 8+ minutes to scroll from Sun to Earth at the speed of light gives a new earth-shattering perspective.
[0] http://www.astronoo.com/en/articles/journey-of-the-photon.ht...
At jet speed it takes best part of a month just to get to the moon, to get to the sun takes 17 years. To reach Neptune you’d have to have left about the same time Columbus visited America.
To be pedantic, no, not really. Commercial jets can travel at speeds up to 955 kilometres per hour (593 mph) (per wikipedia). The speed of sound is roughly 1235 kph (767 mph). Also note that commercial jets usually travel slower than their maximum speed to save fuel.
Space is big. Space is empty. We are nothing to space.
CSS introduces space.
JavaScript introduces waiting.
Seems appropriate that the technology represents itself on this page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Space_Walk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_Space_Walk
(Edit: turns out there's a ton of these, and while most don't have their own page, there's a page collecting them all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model)
It really gives a good feel for the massive difference in distances between the inner and outer solar system. I strongly recommend it to anyone who is in that vicinity.
Largest one being in Sweden, with a scale of 1:20,000,000 (spanning the whole country): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_System_model
In comparison, both the Zurich and Netherlands one are 1:1,000,000,000
http://www.planetesdelyvette.universite-paris-saclay.fr/IMG/...
Here are some approximate dimensions. In Miami the sun would be 9in or 22cm[1], the inner solar system could be depicted on a line 120ft or 35m[2] long, and Pluto would be about 1000yds or 1km[3] away.
Divide by two if the university is in San Francisco, which is about 2000 miles away from Anchorage rather than 4000. Or divide by ten if the university is in Alaska and the nearest star's model is only 400 miles away.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=4000+miles+*+%28diamete...
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=4000+miles+*+%28orbit+r...
[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=4000+miles+*+%28orbit+r...
[1] - https://www.darksky.org/our-work/conservation/idsp/reserves/... [2] - https://www.caherdanieldarksky.com
https://thinkzone.wlonk.com/SS/SolarSystemModel.php?obj=Sun&...
Helps with the planning process for building your own model solar system.
There was a touring one that was in Cambridge (UK) recently and we thoroughly enjoyed walking it even if the walk to Pluto was quite far. Walking it in reverse order would have been better, perhaps. Didn't think of that.
The entire Solar System is highly aberrant. Single star, instead of binary star. Then, a moon around earth, very large moon, besides, it is the same size in the sky (varying over time) as the sun, leading to different eclipses (like anular eclipses, which accurately measured a biblical event 4000 years ago, to the day, I think it was a Tuesday). Like everything is very unique, apparently.
Would love to see something similar for bigger dimensions, e.g. distance to the nearest star, galaxy or exoplanet.
I wish we could see yet another live indicator on that map, a speed indicator of our scrolling in actual mph, km/h, AU, parsec, and speed of light.
this way we can see the speed of our scrolling!!
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is” ― Douglas Adams
Is cool that it's done in SVG. Here's Earth:
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)
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)
I've had people try to "correct" my use of subjunctive... which truly saps my will to live.
If you haven’t done this before, go out into the desert or canyons or the Hoover dam (in the U.S.) and experience viscerally how tiny each of us is relative to nature.
Trying to hold that in my mind while also conceptualizing the distance to Mars, or the size of the sun … I can’t do it!
If you drove 88km an hour it would take you almost 40 hours to drive across 1 pixel!
Our solar system is big big big.
I used to do the math with my kids when they were young and first found out about division. My story would be lets drive to the moon. And then we would figure out how far it was and how fast we could drive.
I love that site.