I’m fascinated by the scale of things in space

I’m fascinated by videos and other visual mediums that compare the sizes of objects and structures in the universe. I can’t get enough of them. And I’m not exclusively talking about planets, stars, black holes, etc. There is also the vast, yet tiny microcosmos. Unfathomable sizes and distances reign supreme in both the microscopic world and the universe at large.

Just for fun I thought I would share some of my favorite examples.

Epic Spaceman

This guy took off (heh) almost as soon as he got started on YouTube. It’s easy to see why. His stuff is incredible. He taught himself Blender and has only been doing VFX for a few years. He just won a bunch of Webbys.

The mind-blowing scale of the Milky Way galaxy

I shrink 10x every 21s until I’m an atom - The Micro Universe

I poured all the galaxies in the Universe into a pool

Other videos

There are many videos on YouTube that visualize the scale of the universe in different ways. Here are some of my favorites.

Powers of Ten (1977)

You Are The Center of The Universe (Literally)

VFX Artist Reveals the True Scale of the Universe

To Scale: THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Interactive

Finally, here are a couple of fun, interactive expressions of the size of things in the universe.

If the Moon were Only One Pixel

Screenshot of a website that is mostly black with a round yellow circle in the center labeled Sun. There is a scale at the bottom indicating that you can scroll horizontally to see more.
Scale representation of the solar system

I absolutely love this one. My favorite thing about it is if you click on the light speed button in the bottom right corner, you can experience in real time how fast light travels away from the sun out into the solar system. Even though light speed is mind-bogglingly fast, it is also much slower than you would think. You hit the button and you think you’re going to go warp speed, but instead the window starts slowly scrolling to the right. In fact, if you were to sit the watch through the whole thing, it would take hours for you to get to Neptune.

https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

Scale of the universe

Screenshot of the Scale of the Universe app. There is an icon of a human and clip art of various human-sized objects. There is a slider at the bottom that indicates that you can zoom out or in from the size you are at.

This is one of the first ones I came across. It’s cool because it allows you to go from human-sized things and zoom out to the size of the universe or venture down into the microcosmos.

https://scaleofuniverse.com