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Magnifying by Powers of Ten
Ron Harwood observes: "Molecular Expressions at Florida State University has a view of Earth starting at 10 million light years and working it's way closer by "powers of ten" till you are at the smallest point scientists can go in the subatomic universe."
There's a book that's been published that is pretty much the same thing, by MIT Physics Professor Philip Morrison and others. It can be found here.
You know, I'm sure this story is a dupe, and I'm sure I've seen it before, but nonetheless, it's still pretty darned amazing to see the universe like that. The number of times you have to zoom out to see the Galaxy from the roof of the laboratory shows you just how small we really are. No wonder we haven't met any extraterrestrials yet, our society, our entire civilisation has literally no impact on even our own solar system, let alone anything further out. Definitely puts my 10AM deadline in to perspective.
For people interested primarily in astronomy, there's a similar thing here which gives a count of the number of stars at different zoom levels. Interestingly, there are only 33 stars within 12.5ly, but there are 250,000 within 250ly. I don't think that sort of distance will be beyond us in a few centuries, if we get our act together. That's an awful lot of exploring to do...
As a sidenote, I would have loved to be the undergraduate student with the digital camera who got that assignment for his final year project!
The original Powers of Ten video (by Charles and Ray Eames) is still the definitive version. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes this web version.
The original is one continuous zoom, from human-scale, all the way out, then al the way in, down to sub-atomic particles. There is narration and various clues to scale, which helps a lot.
It is a landmark film and holds up very well after all these years.
This whole thing was very nicely animated in an IMAX movie called Cosmic Voyage. It was narrated by Morgan Freeman and the graphics and sound were amazing. If you have a nice home theater setup (too bad if you dont! =] ) get Cosmic Voyage from Netflix, turn it up and enjoy.
The fluidity of the animation from a quark to the edge of the known universe is what makes it amazing. So it ends up going further out than this one did.
So it's basically a device that shows the universe in its mind-boggling hugeness with an infinitely small dot-on-a-dot labelled "You Are Here"?
(The wording isn't exact, but I hope I got the gist of it)
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
...planetary orbits weren't visible.
I stand corrected.
-- Mod me down. I am not a karma tart. ffs,gag
Just Turtles.
It's from "A Brief History Of Time" (Stephen Hawking)
From http://www.the-funneled-web.com/hawking.htm:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish.
The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."
Check out this link. A guy at the Exploratorium (the sysadmin?) wrote this page. You plug in how big you want the Sun to be (e.g., 1 inch diameter), and it gives you the scale of the sizes/orbital radii for the planets, the size of a light year, speed of light, and others. I used it in a talk I gave. If you make the Sun the size of a golf ball, Pluto is a grain of sand at the other end of an (American) football field, and the nearest star is another golfball 450+ miles away!