OK, so my numbers are off by a little. That’s what I get for misremembering a book (Bad Astronomy) that I read years ago.
But yeah, you can fly a ship right through the asteroid belt without worrying too much about a collision.
It’s the other way around. It’d take some serious planning and effort to go through the asteroid belt and actually hit something.
The website also states that the moon is drifting away from the earth about 1" each year. In the 60’s, I remember reading it was an inch a century.
Anybody wanna guess how much extra fuel the Saturn V needs to go the extra yard or so since '69? 
Yep, the asteroid belt isn’t anywhere near as crowded as you normally see portrayed in movies. There are hundreds of thousands of asteroids, but they’re spread out over billions of cubic miles of space.
To quote Douglas Adams:
Well, as Hugh Blumenfeld put it,
I’d hate to do the trip at 65mph, though.
Never tell me the odds!
Just think about being Michael Collins - the guy who stayed up in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin were down on the surface of the moon. Talk about isolation.
But really, it’s not that far at all (sound warning).
Me too. But this was after my jokester Astronomy TA in college offered us extra credit to create and bring in a scale model of the solar system. :eek:
Zero? You just have to leave Earth’s orbit and coast the rest of the way, no?
/Sorry if that was rhetorical.
It’s really amazing when you think about it. I mean, the Sun happens to be 400 times the Moon’s diameter, and 400 times as far away. There’s no other planets in the solar system like that. I mean, can you imagine the odds? The odds of that happening is astronomical!
Ooooo… I see what you did there.
Thanks OP for posting that. I love stuff like this.
To contribute to the thread, I will add a website that shows the phase of the moon on a daily basis.
The moon is/was full tonight depending on your location.
It doesn’t include the Moon, but the Thousand Yard Model gives you a pretty good idea of the scale of things in the Solar Sytem. And they’re not what most people expect.
I can’t help but think that a loooooooong, multi-page document is a really difficult way to visualize what could be a very simple illustration (accurate for relative sizes; still looking for one that depicts relative distances).
We just happen to live in a lucky time. In the distant past the moon was much closer to the earth and it is moving ever farther away all the time. In the future this happy arrangement for full eclipses will no longer occur.
I remember reading with amazement that Mars actually has more land area than Earth. It seems contrary to common sense – until you remember that over 70% of the Earth’s surface is water, and Mars has no oceans.
Presumably NASA have already done it several times.
Actually, it has a little bit less. Not by much, but a little less. It’s still remarkable that the numbers are close (at least it is if you look at a comparative picture of the two planets; Earth is much bigger.)
Here’s one that’s accurate for both size and distance. You’ll need an ultra-wide monitor to fully appreciate it. 
The eye doctor asked my father-in-law, “Can you see pretty well?”
“I guess so.”
“Can you see faraway things?”
“I can see the moon. That’s pretty far, isn’t it?”