Almost any picture you see of the Solar System is wrong, especially if you can actually see all the planets on the same page.
Even though we know that the planets are much farther away than we usually see them depicted, we have a persistent habit of not having any idea just how far away these things really are. They’re also incredibly small compared to the distances they span. Let’s do a quick squeegee of the misperception.
The video makes a basic explanation of scale, but for further reading, have a look at sites like Earth as a Peppercorn that provide even more detailed models for understanding the issue.
This doesn’t even touch on the mind-boggling scales involved in visualizing the Milky Way Galaxy and the known universe beyond that.
For example, if our galaxy were the size of the United States, our solar system would be about the size of a quarter. The nearest star would be two football fields away.
Space is big, y’all.
