Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

joshworth.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 189 posts

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#41

Post by TomAnthony »

kenperkins wrote: post #21

Really neat. I enjoyed scrolling to earth. After that it became painful. Thankfully, the solution was easy: Open Chrome Inspector Console: $('.essay').css({ left: '20px', marginBottom: '15px', maxWidth: '600px', position: 'relative' }); $('#bigspace').css('left','inherit');

I just used the shortcut buttons at the top. Your solution is more fun. :)

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#42

Post by cschmidt »

sicher wrote: post #36

Here is another pretty cool solar system scale model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System Some photos here: http://io9.com/5882220/worlds-largest-scale-model-of-the-sol...

Maine has a scale model solar system about 40 miles across. I drive by it every summer.

http://pages.umpi.edu/~nmms/solar/

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#44

Post by NortySpock »

sp332 wrote: post #40

I remember Bill Nye doing this in one episode. He had the earth as a golf ball, I think? He was running around a soccer field showing the planets. And he drove miles away to show where Pluto would be. Edit: this episode! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRIVwGwdxI8#t=250 Edit2: nope, this one (guess he liked this trick lol) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_OWnlS56rE#t=325 Pluto is only 100 meters away, but Alpha Cent…

Actually, in that one, the earth was the size of the ball of a ball-point pen.

The sun was the size of a soccer ball.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#45

Post by Wohui »

Some predecessors, just out of interest:

http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/solarsystem/ This page has been kicking around for ages, not sure how long though.

http://www.scalesolarsystem.66ghz.com/ More recent. This one is vertical (so whiners can scroll with wheel, although all these pages are scrollable in wheel-click mode)

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#46

Post by pcmonk »

danbruc wrote: post #16

1. Nice. 2. Obligatory question - how many working hours were just lost? 3. Why on earth would you use capital M for meters? I really hope I will not look really dumb in a minute, but I immediately knew something was wrong, but it actually took my quite some time to recognize it.

"Why on earth..." I see what you did there.

But seriously, I don't think I've ever heard of using M for meters.

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#47

Post by opminion »

danbruc wrote: post #16

1. Nice. 2. Obligatory question - how many working hours were just lost? 3. Why on earth would you use capital M for meters? I really hope I will not look really dumb in a minute, but I immediately knew something was wrong, but it actually took my quite some time to recognize it.

3. Correct, and not knowing anything about the author I would venture that the reason is that he uses imperial in his everyday life, and thus it has been a concession to the wider world to do this in metric, for which I am grateful :-)

Citation for "lowercase m for meters": http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec06.html

Re: If The Moon Was Only 1 Pixel

#48

Post by hrjet »

Kenji wrote: post #12

I feel like it's not the vastness we can't comprehend, it's the relation between such "tiny" planets and such big distances that's hard to grasp. You can't zoom out or else you stop seeing the planets, you can't zoom in or else the map gets even larger.

To wrap my mind around it, I try to imagine astronomical objects as everyday objects. For example, if Sun was a base-ball in my hand, the earth would be a mote of dust some throwable distance away. My favorite one is: if Sun was the size of a grain of sand, the nearest start would be another grain of sand 30 kms away!
Post reply on HN