Look at this 80,000 light year long ruler

[GlobeMaker]

I made some 3D solid rulers orbit the sun at a distance of
up to 50 thousand light years :

The rulers have lengths of up to 84,000 light years.
But they can only be seen if the Celestia viewer is within
one light year of Sol. This broke the 16,000 ly rule. Sorry.

You can download the rulers and the solarsys.ssc file from the
first link on this page : http://www.reliefglobe.com/video.html

That is my ftp page. The .3ds files start with r_ or f_ for rulers and frames.
Here is a wide angle view of the big objects, light years across :


At bottom left is Sol. The middle ruler is .4 light years long.
The ruler on the middle right is 4.0 ly long, but it is 10 ly away
The ruler on the far right is 40 ly long.
The rulers are fun to play with as they poke between stars.
They provide a frame of reference and scale for viewing
stars and planets.

[Hunter Parasite]

yikes, scared me for a minute... what is the thing in the first pic? because, when you said ruler, i thought you ment the wood sticks with lines and numbers on them. that would be cool though.... an 80,000 lightyear school ruler...

[Malenfant]

I have to admit I don't really know what I'm looking at, other than a huge blocky triangular prism. "Rulers" such as this aren't really practical in Celestia, IIRC Selden had a page full of grids and graticules that are much more useful and, to be brutally honest, a lot less ugly.

Here it is...
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~seb/celesti ... cules.html