The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Every time I see a picture of the solar system, it's someone's model, where the planets are insanely huge relative to each other, or either look really close to the Sun. Here, take a look at this image:

Here, the planets are really close to one another. The distance betwseen Earth and Venus is less than the width of the Earth! You could easily take a rocket to Venus. If you were standing on this Earth, the view of Jupiter would take up a massive part of the sky. But it wouldn't matter because we'd all be dead from the heat of the Sun, which protrayed here is stupidly close to the Earth.

What would an image look like where the relative distances between the planets, and the relative sizes of the planets, was accurately portrayed? Or to phrase it another way, if I was genuinely looking at the solar system from afar, what would I see? I imagine the picture wouldn't even be able to show any of the planets, since they would appear so small in comparison to the massive distances involved.

Image width

The width of the image would have to be at least the distance from the Sun to the furthest planet (which is now officially Neptune, not Pluto). This distance is 4.5 billion kilometres, according to this website. (Interestingly, this is an average value, since the orbit of planets isn't perfectly spherical. So each planet has a minimum and maximum value from the Sun, too).

Portraying the largest planet

The size of the largest planet, Jupiter, is 148,200 kilometres, according to this site. Essentially, abot 0.1 million km.

This means that if the size of our image must represent 4,500 million kilometres and Jupiter's diameter is 0.15 million kilometres then Jupiter's width on our image, as a percentage, will be (0.15 / 4500) * 100 = 0.0033% (i.e., a third of one hundreth of 1%)

This means that if Jupiter was portrayed as a single pixel, the rest of the width of the image would have to be 1 / 0.000033 pixels wide, which is 30,303 pixels.

We could be fair and offer to round Jupiter's width up to the nearest pixel, in which case our image would need a minimum of 15,000 pixels. This is more than a standard image has (usually at most, say, 10,000 pixels). My computer screen is only capable of showing 1,366 pixels. So we can't show Jupiter on an accurate image of the Solar System.

The Sun

Would we see the Sun on such on image? The Sun is 1,392,000 million kilometres in width. As a percentage on our image, this is 0.03%. So we'd see the Sun if the image had more than around 3,333 pixels. Since my computer screen is incapable of this, then no, we wouldn't see the Sun, it would appear too small to see.

Accurate image

So my accurate representation of our Solar System actually looks like this:

Everything appears too small to see anything. However, if you really were in Space and were looking at the Solar System, then I would think you would be able to see the Sun, even though it'd still appear very small. Your view would be far wider than that of a laptop screen. Also, the Sun gives off a lot of light, making its width appear larger than it actually is.My conclusion is, if you want to potray the Sun and Neptune accurately in the same image, then the massive distance involved outscales by far the size of even the Sun itself.

The Moon and the Earth

What about if we drew the moon and the Earth, with the relative distance and sizes intact? Actually, wikipedia has already done this:

Here we can actually see the Earth, and the moon, on our computer screens. The distance between us and the moon isn't so far, after all.