earth to moon distance scale

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Does this picture surprise you?
Earth and Moon to Scale

I have to admit even though my perception of the size difference between the two has been accurate, I was waaaay off in how far away the moon was.
Especially since (according to the picture) a pixel ~ 600km, which is higher than most objects orbit the earth.
For some reason I always pictured that once the space shuttle got into orbit it would only have to go another 25,000 km or so (2x earth diameter). I never pictured it to be 30x the earth’s diameter.
No wonder we never go there anymore.

(I’m thinking my poor peception of this stems from crappy 3-d models seen when I was a kid.)

2

It actually seems closer than what I pictured. But that was after I’d read about it. When I was a kid, my perception was totally different.

3

Yeah, wow. I thought it was only about 1 Earth-diameter away.

I didn’t realize it was so big, either. Always thought it’d be something like a 6-hour drive around the moon (at 65mph). It’s more like 4 days.

4

Slight hijack, but the bottom picture is the one that surprised me. The moon’s diameter is about 1/4 that of the earth…but I remembering hearing that about its mass, not diameter. So, it was much smaller in comparison than I expected.

5

(Missed edit window.)

I guess I need to stop drawing it like this in iSketch. And here I thought I was the secret bastard child of Einstein and Picasso.

6

That’s about the scale/perspective I expected. It’s not so far, but not so near either.

7

As a rough guide, driving to the Moon would be approximately like driving fifty round trips across the United States.

8

I think he meant driving around it’s equator, on the surface–not driving TO the moon.

9

I don’t know if that is a commentary on how small the moon is or how big Africa is.

10

Another comparison I saw in a book always stuck with me.

Say the Earth is a basketball. The space shuttle orbits something like a half-inch above it. The moon would be a softball about (guessing from memory) 15 feet away.

11

Sounds about right.

And about the length of a football field away (NOT counting the endzones!) would be the asteroid belt. And if you smooshed all of the asteroids together into one huge ball, it’d be about the size of…

…a grain of sand.

12

Hm, it’d have to be a pretty big grain of sand. If the Earth was a basketball, the asteroid Ceres in the same scale would be more than 2/3 of an inch in diameter.

13

Hmm…

14

So all of the asteroids together would be a large pebble, with Ceres as a small pebble. :slight_smile:

15

I was not surprised by the diagram.

I did not know that the earth is the densest planet, though. It makes sense, being the largest solid planet, but it’s still a cool factoid.

16

I’m not clear on if you’re posting that info to back up the grain of sand reference. But just in case you are:

The Earth is 12750 Km in diameter. The site your quote comes from shows that Ceres is 933 Km in diameter. So Ceres is 7.3% the diameter of Earth. A basketball is 9.29 inches in diameter, so Ceres to the same scale would be .68 inches in diameter. Finally, Wikipedia says grains of sand range in diameter from 0.0625 (or 1⁄16 mm, or 62.5 micrometers) to 2 millimeters. :slight_smile:

17

So can you potentially drive a “spaceship” through the asteroid belt without worrying about any damage?

18

I think your numbers are off. Your numbers give a 20:1 ratio of distances. The actual ratio is more like 400:1. If the moon is a ball fifteen feet away then the distance to the asteroid belt is twenty football fields.

19

Or about double that (~30’ if a basketball is a foot in diameter).

20

Perhaps you are… Even if I hadn’t known what the drawing represented it’s obvious at a glance. The green & blue coloring helps, of course. It’s a great sketch! (But yeah, the scale is off. Oh well.)