[heyitskevin]

For a visual of how far away Pluto really is from Earth(and really how far away everything in our solar system is from eachother) I recommend checking out Riding Light https://vimeo.com/117815404

"This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the surface of the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system, from a human perspective."

The video is 45 minutes long and makes it just past Jupiter. It would have to be 5.5 hours long to show Pluto.

[gulpahum]

Another way to understand the distances is the old scroll-through solar system. If the moon is one pixel, then Pluto is pretty far away.

http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.h...

[r3bl]

Man, how silly does it sound that I'm struggling to travel 40 kilometres twice a week when I passed the 1 billion kilometres mark here and still haven't reached Saturn.

[VikingCoder]

I like to think of a marathon as one AU.

If the start line of the marathon happens at the center of the Sun, and the finish line is at the center of the Earth...

You run for 213 yards to get out of the sun.

You make it to the surface of the Earth at 5 feet, 10 inches from the finish line.

(If the moon was eclipsing the sun, you would have run over it 122 yards from the finish line, and it would have a diameter of 3 feet, 2 inches.)

And Pluto's orbit? Well, it's 859 miles from the start line.

If the marathon had been in New York? It's kind of like running to Chicago. (It's a tad further than that.)

Oh, and on this scale, how fast is light travelling? 188 miles per hour. The world record human marathon speed was 13 miles per hour. So, 7% of the speed of light.

[frogpelt]

Also, this guy built a scale model in the Black Rock Desert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR3Igc3Rhfg

EDIT: This one doesn't include Pluto.

[lutorm]

If you're in Europe, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System (which goes all the way to the termination shock, apparently.)

[fapjacks]

Sweden is so awesome. Thanks for sharing this!

[lisper]

Cool!

I once designed a scale model of the solar system for an elementary school class. The sun was a ping-pong ball. At this scale, earth is about three meters from the sun, and Pluto is a hundred meters away. Both earth and pluto at this scale are too small to see with the naked eye.

[nostrademons]

I did the NSF Young Scholars Program at MIT Haystack observatory the summer after 8th grade, and one of the events was a scale model of the solar system. The sun was a basketball, Jupiter was a golf ball, Saturn was one of those little rubber bouncy balls, and all the inner planets were grains of sand chosen to mimic their colors and relative sizes. Jupiter was off at the end of the parking lot, Saturn was in the grass at the edge of the site, and Uranus/Neptune/Pluto were omitted for lack of space.

[tdkl]

Grasping that it took New Horizon about one year since launch to reach Jupiter, then about 9 years extra to reach Pluto is also a nice demonstration.

[maaku]

And that was _with_ a gravity assist at Jupiter...

[sp332]

New Horizons' next target is a rock about 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. It will only take 4 years to get there. https://i.imgur.com/OGKtgsq.gifv

[sp332]

Regarding downvotes: It's true, here's a source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_MU69#Exploration

[serengeti]

This is the perfect evening activity. I could have watched it for 5.5 hours.

[thangalin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wM0JMaM_tdQ

Video I made to show distances between planets, with short stops at each one to show off its spectacular beauty. Earth was the most difficult to render due to lights on its night side; Mars proved challenging because of its atmosphere.

[dombili]

Fantastic video. Thank you for sharing.

[jdnier]

And Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" makes the perfect soundtrack.

[est]

It would be cooler if the background stars follow the rules of relativity.

[valarauca1]

So disappeared?

They'd blueshift up past gamma rays and become invisible. While behind you they'd redshift down to nothing.