Here's a browser-based "game" that graphically illustrates the enormity of the Solar System. Essentially, you navigate to the website and the relative size and distances between objects are seen by scrolling down the page. Very neat.
http://www.omgspace.net/
Info from the site:
Quote:
Hello
OMG SPACE is the thesis project of Margot Trudell, an OCAD graduate of the graphic design program in Toronto, Canada. This website aims to illustrate the scale and the grandeur of our solar system, as well as illustrate through the use of infographics our work in the exploration of our solar system with various spacecraft.
Why?
Despite all the work that scientists are putting into space exploration and research, and all that we've learned and acheived over the past half-century, the general public isn't very aware of it. I believe that this is mostly due to how this information is communicated to the general public, in a very academic and scientific manner. It's hard for most people without backgrounds in these areas to really comprehend what it means when we send a probe past Jupiter or how far away Eris really is, and it's simply difficult to truly grasp the magnitude of our solar system and all its celestial inhabitants. Thus, I decided that visuals would greatly help people's understanding of space and our achievements in space exploration, and as a graphic designer I was more than excited to get to work.
Details
All the planets on this website are to scale, including the sun and dwarf planets. The distances between each object and the sun are also to scale, and both the planets and relative distances are to scale with each other. Everything is calculated at a ratio of 1:647 to make easier numbers to work with and give me reasonable pixels sizes for this website. So if the Sun is 1,391,000 kilometers in diameter, then 1,391,000 divided by 647 equals 2149.92, and if I convert kilometeres to pixels where one kilometer is one pixel, my image of the sun is 2149 pixels squared. The same works for the distances: if Mercury is 57,909,050km from the Sun, with the ratio of 1:647, the distance is boiled down to 89503.94, so 89,503 pixels from where the Sun is placed on the screen. With everything calculated using the same ratio, all the sizes and distances are then properly to scale relative to one another.
Note
The information used to create the contents of this website is accurate as of early 2011. Information has not been updated since then, so mission status' and intentions may have changed since then, as well as our understanding of our solar system and our knowledge of its contents, and those changes are not reflected here (this mainly applies to current and future missions).
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