The Scale of the Solar System – a 3rd attempt
Some time ago, we featured a poster created by the Planerary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla which showed all of the Sun’s largest satellites (or at least, everything we know of that’s bigger than 400km across), to scale. She has since refined the image to correct perspective effects that made Saturn look bigger than Jupiter, and you can see the result to the right. Gas giants, rocky planets, minor planets, asteroids, moons, they’re all there. Click the image to see it in full size – it’s really quite spectacular. And as a side issue, anybody who still thinks Pluto is a planet is hereby challenged to see if they can find it on the poster. It is there, but if you can figure out which one it is, then I’ll accept that maybe it is special after all!
I’m being childish, I know, but there’s something irresistible about baiting the Pluto lovers. They’re just so passionate, so sincere, so loud!