Get some perspective on the galaxy with these videos
June 30, 2009
BY BILL FERRIS
Want to feel insignificant? No, you say? I’ll take that as a yes.
If you were already feeling like a tiny speck of dust in the universe, these YouTube1 videos will show you just how tiny we are in the grand scheme of the universe. Each video sizes up Earth against the larger planets in the solar system, and the sun, which in turn gets dwarfed by the hypergiant stars in our galaxy.
You can use these videos during your next astronomy class when trying to give your students a sense of the scale of the universe. Much like Sugar Stacks or The MegaPenny Project, these videos use images rather than words to convey size and scale. It’s much easier to appreciate the size of giant stars when shown next to the heavenly bodies we’re already familiar with.
1. If your school blocks YouTube, please see this collection of workarounds.
Our Solar System - Size Of Planets and Stars to Scale
Related stuff:
Peek into space with Windows on the Universe
That’s a Lot of Pennies: The MegaPenny Project
Visualize your sugar intake at Sugar Stacks
Photo credit: Mike Monteiro on Flickr.
