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Visualization Link: https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

I don't belive that this is a really new visualization (created in 2014?), but it's a really good one for helping visualize just how big even our solar system is. The problem with every diagram of the solar system is that it can't accurately display the distances of the planets relatively to each other without making the planets so insignificantly small that they would take up a fraction of a pixel. As a result though, these diagrams end up only really being helpful for seeing their names and how they look, as evidenced by this random image I found after Googling:

image

And while there have been in-person examples that primarily illustrate the distance between the Earth and Moon, it's not quite a data visualization that you could experience fully unless you were in-person. (Linked here is a demonstration in-person by Neil Degrasse Tyson 4 years ag0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRkJoKvQpPc)

Which is where this visualization created by Josh Worth comes in. Titled "If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel: A Tediously Accurate Scale Model of the Solar System", it utilzies a really really really long HTML page to help demonstrate the vastness of space. Scrolling at a moderate speeds would take a little under 10 seconds or so to reach Earth, and honestly from this scale, the Moon and Earth don't even look too far apart.

image

I think the real thing to note though is the scrollbar progress on the bottom; it's barely close to the end where Pluto resides! Especially as you go to the edges of the page, you could scroll at the fastest speed possible by your mouse and you still simply still see nothing for so long. To put the fast scrolling into perspective, it honestly looks like I'm scrolling at what looks to be about maybe a hundred or so times the speed of light, as you only need to scroll quite slowly to average 300,000km/s.

A quick glance into the HTML file shows that some of the divs are set up to 1,700,500px!