Celestia Forums

hi all,

it's always hard to explain to people distances in the universe. I remember a read a book few years ago where the author was comparing sizes and distances with common object and distances on earth.

With this purpose would it be possible for exemple to create an addon with the image of a football court, a bean for earth an orange for the sun, etc ... (and as far as size comparison are ok). If it was possible this could also be extrapolated to the unverse and distances between galaxies.

Sorry if this sound stupid, but i feel it would be a very usefull material for explaining scales in the universe.

(I also like the project Fridger was talking about ...)

Thanks

Its true!! I have heard many times about football courts when trying to explain the size of something(for example craters on mars...)

There's already an astronomical eqivalent to the football field. Although the old Earth terrestrial football field is still great for measuring craters, try explaining planet/stellar distances in terms of Astronomical Units or AUs. AUs are the distance from Earth to the Sun, about 93 million miles.

Hmm, well actually therein lies another problem. Now that I think about it AUs are actually great for explaining inter-solar distances, but for stellar, there probably should be a conversion to light years somewhere along the way.

Does anybody have the AU to LY conversion rate?

--Starman

1 light year = 63239.7 AU

Grant

Why nobody uses parsecs??
Maybe is because, at least for me, it doesnt say anything. I mean:
1 AU= distance to the sun
1 ly= the distance light travels in one year
1 ps= the height of an isosceles(spelling?) triangle when the head angle is 1 arc sec and the base 2AU(~300.000.000 km)... WHAT???

in factwhat i was thinking about was for example to make a visual comparison as if for example the solar sytem was a huge football field the sun in the midle and pluto "in the goal" and to have a visaulazition of this.

I don't know exactly but in this case the sun would be an orange or a greeen bean, earth a green bean or a sand grain, .... An addon showing this like this would be very good to give an idea of scales at least in the solar system.

So maybe we could start by :

If the solar system was a football field what would be the size of
1/ the sun
2/ Jupiter
3/ earth

and respectively what on earth is spherique and has this size

Thanks Grant. I propose here and now in this thread we create a new measurement.

The Celestia Plutonic Astronomical Unit (CPAU or Unit)


Pluto is 3.6 Billion Miles average distance from the Sun. That equals to 38.7280808 Astronomical Units.

I propose we round that up to 40AU. So a CPAU is 40AU across.

Let me know what you guys think, I may just post this seperately to get more feedback if you like it.

--Starman

Guest,

You might want to take a look at the Web page http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celestia/graticules.html

Although they aren't exactly what you say, it provides several sets of scales -- au, ly and parsec.

If you guys want to use a free online conversion calculator, go to:

http://www.ilpi.com/msds/ref/distanceunits.html

--Starman