Our solar system in pixels

The solar system is a big place.

around 40,000,000,000,000 km

to be precise. However, when dealing with space, there are much better ways of measuring distance.

But before I tell you about that, there’s a star coming up.

The Sun

Diameter: 1,400,000km – 1.4798012 x 10⁻⁷ light years

Pretty big, right?

Also, the real sun is around 3,779,528,000 bigger than that image.

Next, it’s Mercury.

Pretty small, compared to the Sun.

How about Venus? Let’s find out.

Slightly bigger, but still nothing on the Sun.

So why do we mostly measure space in light years instead of km?

First, I’ll put it in perspective:

When our galaxy is 52,850 light years, you can begin to understand why we don’t measure space in kilometres. What’s simpler to understand; 52,850 or 500,013,850,000,000,000?!

Anyway, back to our pixel planets.

Next up, it’s everywhere you’ve ever been. Without further ado…

I present to you…

That’s only 12 pixels, but it’s still 12,742 kilometers. For Earth, it’s simpler to measure in KM, as it would be a stupidly small number in light years.

Also, if you’d like to find out about the moon, click here to see my other piece of work!

Moving on to the next one…

Mars is one of the smallest planets, at only 6,779km. That’s smaller than the distance between Newcastle and Florida.

Jupiter, while it’s not nearly as big as the Sun, is absolutely massive. 139,820km, to be exact. Scroll up to Mars and then back down to Jupiter to fully appreciate its size.

For simplicity, I’ve missed out the rings in these drawings, but even without them Saturn is pretty big.

The penultimate planet in our galaxy, Uranus is 50,724km in diameter.

And finally; Neptune.

Thanks for scrolling through the Milky Way!

All graphics by me.