Space Infographic - Keep scrolling & reach 13 billion miles from earth | Hacker News Reader

Space Infographic - Keep scrolling & reach 13 billion miles from earth

bbc.com

83 pointsselvan23 comments

I am a fan of visualisations of this kind, starting with Eames' powers of ten, But this didn't impress me. The scale changes too arbitrarily to keep a feeling for the actual distances growing, and the wave line made no sense to me, just irritated. A better take on the subject (regarding overall composition, individual images and music could be better): http://htwins.net/scale2/

This info graphic does however help people better understand the asteroid belt ranges.

I knew Jupiter gets impacted by a lot of asteroids but had no idea it is technically inside the asteroid belt.

> The scale changes too arbitrarily to keep a feeling for the actual distances growing,

Yeah, this is the issue I have with it as well. The whole point of these things is to get a feel for the scale, which is totally impossible if the scale keeps changing.

It took me a second to get the wave line (I thought it had something to do with time relativity, since there was a time scale) but it looks like the line is a literal 'string' of distance measurement just wound back and forth to compress it. If it's an accurate compression, I thought it was pretty clever and impressive.

"1,660km: Farthest travelled by a dog"

I initially thought this one was a joke. Turns out it wasn't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight_records#Lon...

There're even stamps produced as a tribute to these space dogs: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Veterok_a...

It gave me chills to scroll all the way down, and finally get to the Voyager 1 probe.

obligatory xkcd link: http://xkcd.com/482/

that was heaps more meaningful than the bbc one

The most amazing thing for me was that Cassini (1.50bn kms) is 300 million miles away from Saturn (1.20bn kms), but still it is orbiting Saturn.

Is this just the furthest point of its elliptical orbit? Or is it typical of how we send spacecraft to orbit other planets? Or is it a typo?

I ask because according to the infographic, our communications satellites are at a tiny 35,000 kms, whereas 300 million kms is twice the distance from Earth to the Sun...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=mass+of+satu...

Saturn is 95x more massive than Earth.

That is wrong. Cassini's apogee (aposelene) is inside the orbit of Iapetus, which is 3.5m km from Saturn. Cassini does not fly by Iapetus in its tours; the orbit was adjusted to do so once but will not happen again.

The graphic is representing the distance of Saturn at its closest point to Earth (as it does with Mars and Venus), but the distance of Cassini at its farthest point from Earth. The latter is larger by the diameter of Earth's orbit which is your 300m km difference.

Thanks. I didn't think it added up :)

I was surprised that the whole page is only 3 MB. Nice PNG optimization.

Why not flip this upside down and have the user start at the bottom of the page and scroll up?

I don't think there is a strong case for either direction, therefore they are both fine.

The planes and balloon are upside down relative to the earth and the man is skydiving in the wrong direction.

Would have been nicer, although admittedly much more impractical, if the scale didn't keep on changing. Didn't quite fill me with as much awe as numbers those large should have.

You want this book: http://mishka.lockandhenner.com/blog/?cat=45

Thanks for the link.

What a phenomenal waste of ink!

That is possibly the coolest thing I have ever seen. Thanks!

If the scale didn't change, scrolling down would have taken a lot longer. There was plenty of empty space as it were now.

> impractical

I believe if they kept the scale at 10km the page would be 53 kilometers long.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com