If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014) | Hacker News Reader

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel (2014)

joshworth.com

257 points_Microft69 comments

Many previous submissions, but the meaningful threads appear to be:

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)

Yeah, wow! 27 submissions altogether. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=joshworth.com%2Fdev%2Fpixelspa...

It is pretty interesting. I once clicked a link here provided by the man himself.

This website is a great example for me of useful, interesting, and original things that can be done on the Internet, instead of the abundant nonsense. Hope there was list of these websites.

I hope there was a search engine.

https://old.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/top/

I don't know, the UI seems screwed up to me. They should have scrolled vertically, for one. It's more natural to people and mice design.

Glad to see this showing up every few years. After its initial launch, I think I helped the creator add the localization and lightspeed features: https://joshworth.com/updates-to-the-solar-system-map/

...and we eventually met up and had lunch.

I noticed the new light speed feature.. Shockingly slow compared to scrolling, really drives it home.

Utterly depressing tbh

This is an amazing feature. It really shows how much we are stuck on our little blue pixels heap and how even getting to even Mars is an exploit.

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System for a very large scale model of the solar system.

Very neat, I'd never heard of this! Here in Melbourne we have a much smaller version set out along a ~6km walk by the bay: https://www.portphillip.vic.gov.au/media/svodom2p/solar-syst...

Thanks, will check it out next weekend.

This one is really driving home the scale of the solar system. Another amazing visualization of distances is the video "Powers of Ten" that goes to the largest and smallest distances. It was filmed in 1977 already but that only adds to its charme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEHCCsFFIuY

Star Size Comparison 3 is jaw-dropping. The reversal at the end is mesmerizing.

c is relatively slow

Only from our point of view. Photons have zero travel time from their perspective (thanks to Einstein). When you go with different speeds, approaching c, you see different distances (and things), and with just 1g acceleration, the same that pulls you down right now, you can go to the stars, galaxies and… well, just watch yourself:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=b_TkFhj9mgk (30min)

Discussed this with my non-programmer, slightly claustrophobic wife. Thinking about the vastness of space terrifies her, and she feels the same about the vastness of the internet and software. I'd never thought of a codebase as occupying that same kind of physical vastness before.

Wouldn't the vastness of space soothe someone who is claustrophic?

Good point! I meant agoraphobic. She hates being in a wide-open field, for example.

If you like to scroll vertically instead of horizontally, you might like this one that takes you to the bottom of the ocean:

https://neal.fun/deep-sea/

Had my daughter make a scaled model of the solar system, radius of 1km: https://youtu.be/-fPm5mj0Bhg

I remember seeing this page back in the day and always thought it was really funny how it describes itself as being 'A tediously accurate scale model of the solar system' - you scroll over a bit and it points to "1 Pixel" for scale - but the "pixel" it points to is actually two pixels [0].

[0] https://i.jollo.org/MZosAzpl.png

That could just be your client trying to handle a pixel-sized thing that isn't exactly aligned to your display's pixel grid.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom, you will indeed see Uranus.

This reminds me of the "Universe in a Nutshell" app which also attempts to visualise the various scales of the universe.

https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/products/universe-in-a-nutshe...

I'd like to knock up a solar system in a right scale and I wondered how can I do that. Now that I see this article I think I just can't, not in a regular room at least. I guess I will not have my solar system in an accurate scale hung on my ceiling. Too bad

It's a fun thing for a walking/biking trail near you if you can get park permission though!

We have one scattered in our city:

https://theadventourist.com/solar-system-zagreb-croatia

There is also the famous one starting in Stockholm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System

and one on a German island: http://www.sternwarte-norderney.de/planetenlehrpfad.html

Another one in Eau Claire, Wisconsin: https://www.visiteauclaire.com/listing/eau-claire-planet-wal...

I walked through the "Planetenweg" in Switzerland. It was so cool ! https://www.utokulm.ch/en/uetliberg/planet_trail

But I can't have that in my bedroom

There is another one in Hagen in Westfalen, Germany.

Allegedly the first. Sorry, didn't find any english link, but clicking on the 'Virtuelle Tour' there leads you to at least some maps where you can see how it is spread out through the city.

http://www.planetenmodell-hagen.de/

It helps that Pluto is no longer a planet but not much.

Uranus is 4.5 billion km from Sun and if, for the sake of simplicity, the model is 4.5m wide, that would mean that Earth with its diameter of ~13000km would be a speck just 0.013mm wide. That should be 1/10th of a single dot at a resolution of 200dpi if you are planning to print a map (one dot at 2000dpi but good luck printing that;). You might want to consider adding an arrow and a label.

You mean Neptune and Pluto's orbit is so eccentric that it is sometimes closer to the Sun than Neptune.

Good catch, thanks!

I was thinking of something like that : https://donpedrobrooklyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/oute...

But in a right scale. If the earth has a scale of 1/10th of a dot, that would be a bad decoration

You can always look at the size dimension instead - you can relatively easily have the planets to scale next to each other (As long as you exclude the sun, of course).

Ever since I found out that the planets would fit neatly into the gap between the Earth and the Moon I've been toying with it as a tattoo idea

I wanted to respect the current distances, the sizes and the places of each planet to make it really real. Maybe like here https://theskylive.com/3dsolarsystem I was thinking of painting the planets myself

It reminds me of this quote from Feynman [0]:

"The next question was — what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inward."

It's easy to take a lot of things for granted, but it's amazing that gravity pulls from such a phenomenal distance.

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman

It's a good thing as we get more high res monitors the solar system is going to shrink. This would have been much much worse back on my Atari800xl

"Tedious" is right. Must have been designed for a phone, because on my desktop I gave up scrolling before I got to the first planet.

side scrolling is really fast with a trackpad

I clicked on the scroll bar to zoom through. Still pretty tedious, but I got the end.

You can hold down the right-arrow key to scroll, and you reach Mercury in 12 seconds.

I was just looking at this site earlier today independently of HN. I revisit it several times a year, mainly because I can’t get enough "scale of the universe" comparisons (if you know any good ones, please send them my way).

I especially love the light speed auto-scroll because it does a great job of visualizing just how slow the speed of light is (or how vast space is).

> 1 pixel → ·‭ = 3474.8 km ← The diameter of the moon

This seems wrong to me. Would not using area instead of diameter (squaring the circle, as it were) yield a more correct-looking result? As in, the area of one pixel should equal the apparent two-dimensional area of the moon.

does it matter when everything displayed is very closely approximated by a circle?

Seems fine to me given the main objective here is to show distances, not size of things.

One of the most compelling short VR experiences I've tried is Titans of Space PLUS, which gives a tour around the solar system, and then compares our sun to other stars.

The sense of scale when you have depth and head movement had me quaking at a few moments.

Here's my 3D render of a solar system grand tour that uses time to show the enormity of distances:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0JMaM_tdQ

Thanks. I love almost any use of Michael Nyman's music, and feel compelled to recommend watching Peter Greenaway's film "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover," where a different arrangement and orchestra plays the same piece for a pivotal scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WSFVdQQwhc

One of my favorite documentaries ever uses the same concept - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIxAPFYDsnQ

Masterful copy, a feature many leave as an after thought but one of the slickest levers for user delight. Bravo 1 pixel moon man

It would be interesting to see a little indicator of how fast your scrolling speed is in terms of speed of light.

On my screen, it's taking about 4s to scroll one light minute (15 times light speed). So if the map extended all the way to Proxima Centauri, it would take over 3 months of continuous scrolling to get there.

Click the little 'C' icon in the bottom right and it will start automatically scrolling at the speed of light (which, spoiler alert, turns out to be pretty slow)

http://exoplanetapp.com/

This is one of the few tools that really gives a good sense of the relative scale of the solar system.

Now that the moon is only 1px. Imagine all the super massive 40pt text staring at you from space.

It's somewhat interesting that I was the happiest with Pluto being shown.

Love the Female/Male symbols for Venus and Mars, nice touch

Um. Are those not the standard symbols?

They are indeed the standard symbols for those planets, and they do also coincide with the gender symbols, presumably because of the way the associations played out in classical mythology.

Fun extra fact: in Western alchemy, the symbols for major solar system objects ("planets", even though not all of them are planets by the modern astronomical definition) were also used to represent metals. Except HN seems to delete the symbols when I try to post them, so you'll have to look them up yourself, I guess!

The scale is pretty accurate and all, but why is there giant text in space?

Relocated space trash from Earth‘s sattelites, neatly arranged.

Ttuly horrifying

My god, it's full of pithy remarks!

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