A Nice Illustration of Scale...

[signless]

While most of us here are intelligent (and imaginative) enough to envision the grand scales involved in our fair game...a little visual illustration never hurts.
I found the following, while not exactly crystal clear, at least interesting enough to give me pause for a "holy cr*p" moment.

http://www.rense.com/general72/size.htm

 

[aramis]

cool...

 

[ElHombre]

i feel verrry small all of a sudden.

 

[Malenfant]

That's pretty darn cool.

 

[TheEngineer]

Guess the sol system is a pretty place.
Too many monsters out there.
Lets stay here.

 

[mike wightman]

"Insignificant speck" doesn't seem small enough...

 

[Malenfant]

For all that I see the stats of these stars (which is pretty much all the time), those pictures really hammer home the size differences. Antares is about 5 AU in radius, which is about a thousand times larger than our Sun and so big that Jupiter would almost be skimming its surface if it was in our solar system... but seeing it in those images made me appreciate its size a lot better than just looking at the numbers.

 

[Pickles]

Spectacular. Every school, museum, parliament building and boardroom should have this on their wall.

 

[Scarecrow]

It's funny, but for some reason I've always just assumed that all stars were pretty much the same size - dunno why. Wow! Just.... WOW!

Crow
(feeling very small indeed)

 

[Gruffty]

<Gulp!>

That really does put those stars' and planets' sizes into perspective.........

 

[Border Reiver]

I really had no idea. I knew that some star were more massive than others but this really hits home.

 

[TheEngineer]

Somehow pure data, e.g. like the stellar radii table in LBB 6 or the habitable zone tables in MTs RefManual, is far less impressive.
I never really cared, what it means that the habitable orbit is number 12, at 307 AU ....

 

[Liam Devlin]

WOW......
take a deep breath and remember how small and fragile planet earth is again..

"I'll think I'll go sit down and think a while now.."

 

[Pickles]

Right, now we need one of our resident CGI wizards to do a version with better graphics!

 

[Plankowner]

And that was just the Size scale. Try looking at some comparisons on Distance. The sun is a basketball, Earth is across the parking lot, Pluto is down the block a ways and Alpha Centauri is MILES away. That can be pretty humbling too.

 

[Malenfant]

That said, it'd be nice if they got the radii correct - Rigel is actually bigger than Aldebaran, and Sirius looks too big as well. So if anyone's going to do a better version, use these numbers for the stellar radii:

Sun: 1
Sirius: 1.7
Pollux: 8.8
Arcturus: 25
Aldebaran: 40
Rigel: 70
Betelgeuse: 650
Antares: 1000 (?)

I've seen measurements for Antares ranging from 3 AU (700 solar radii) to 5 AU (1000 solar radii), so make of that what you will

 

[Malenfant]

Originally posted by Scarecrow:
It's funny, but for some reason I've always just assumed that all stars were pretty much the same size - dunno why. Wow! Just.... WOW!

Obviously they're not .

It goes the other way too though - Red Dwarfs (M V ) like Proxima Centauri or Barnard's Star are not much larger than Jupiter. Given that red dwarf stars considerably outnumber stars like the sun, our star is actually a relatively large star in the grand scheme of things. Bear in mind that those really big stars are statistically extremely rare.

And a White Dwarf like Sirius B is about the same size as Earth.

 

[jfetters]

Originally posted by Plankowner:
And that was just the Size scale. Try looking at some comparisons on Distance. The sun is a basketball, Earth is across the parking lot, Pluto is down the block a ways and Alpha Centauri is MILES away. That can be pretty humbling too.

Yeah, this is pretty amazing.

I Remember about 20 years ago, I was in Germany on vacation (I can't remember the exact city we were in), but they had set out plaques on the sidewalks that illustrated realative distances of the planets within the solar system.

These things were all over the city. I remember it being a nice walk. I'm just glad they didn't have interstellar distances represented.

 

[Pickles]

Originally posted by Malenfant:
It goes the other way too though - Red Dwarfs (M V ) like Proxima Centauri or Barnard's Star are not much larger than Jupiter ... And a White Dwarf like Sirius B is about the same size as Earth.

That's pretty amazing, too. Too much amazing for one day! Ok, so when Scarecrow or Andrew do a pretty version, they'll have to add in a few dwarfs, as well ...

 

[ElHombre]

Originally posted by Plankowner:
And that was just the Size scale. Try looking at some comparisons on Distance. The sun is a basketball, Earth is across the parking lot, Pluto is down the block a ways and Alpha Centauri is MILES away. That can be pretty humbling too.

here's one scale i recall from one of the books in my library. there are approxiamtely the same number of AUs in a light-year as there are inches in a mile. so the solar system would fit in a room and AC would be in the next town.