Things That Are Much Bigger Than You Always Thought

[DesertDog]

@ioioio

The Milky Way is bigger than we thought,
and
the Andromeda Galaxy is smaller than we thought.

Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

[TruCelt]

This Unicorn Tapestry. I’ve seen a hundred reproductions, but even the digitized images don’t begin to convey the enormity or the exquisite detail. I could have stood there for hours.

[bump]

@Sir_T-Cups

This is a good one. To this day I say the single largest structure I’ve ever been inside* is St. Peter’s.

I’ve been in larger, but they’re all sports stadiums like the Astrodome, for example.

But St. Peter’s is just colossal, and it’s very rarely obvious due to the way they have to photograph it to see actual people. It always looks smaller, or your eyes assume the windows are human scale, or something like that.

[Dahu]

I was in Cologne last weekend the cathedral seemed HUGE. I’ve seen it before, and seen most of the big cathedrals in Europe, but I don’t remember being as impressed as I was this time.

It was night and lit up. And from the station plaza it is raised a bit. But wow.

[TruCelt]

@Joey_P

One of the clips in that video show a huge earth mover next to a school bus. I live/work close to Bucyrus Erie (now Caterpillar). They make (made) some of the largest earth moving equipment in the world. From time to time I’d see a flat bed semi driving down the road with a single, enormous part on it. Like just one giant gear or just the front bucket.
Very different than when I lived near Case and would routinely see one or two large tractors (and always with a spare tire) on one flatbed.
I’ve also seen windmill blades on trucks, also absolutely enormous.

In Melbourne FL once I got stuck in traffic behind a “Wide Load” that was taking up two lanes. It was a single tire. It was actually quite disconcerting to see it. Dad said it was probably headed to Kennedy Space Center; they have huge vehicles to move the rockets around.

[Siam_Sam]

Yo mama’s ass.

[Machine_Elf]

@TruCelt

In Melbourne FL once I got stuck in traffic behind a “Wide Load” that was taking up two lanes. It was a single tire. It was actually quite disconcerting to see it. Dad said it was probably headed to Kennedy Space Center; they have huge vehicles to move the rockets around.

They do have huge vehicles to move rockets around, but they’re tracked vehicles.. It’s still possible those tires were bound for KSC, but I expect they’d be used for something else.

[casdave]

Dry docks - you may have seen pictures, and you might even have looked down into one, but when you actually stand on the dock floor and look up, its way bigger than you ever thought.

The ships that go into the dry docks, ships can look plenty big enough when you stand alongside them, but when you get one in a dry dock and stand underneath, they are just huge.

[j666]

@casdave

Dry docks - you may have seen pictures, and you might even have looked down into one, but when you actually stand on the dock floor and look up, its way bigger than you ever thought.

The ships that go into the dry docks, ships can look plenty big enough when you stand alongside them, but when you get one in a dry dock and stand underneath, they are just huge.

I got a flash of vertigo just reading that.