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Incredible map shows just how empty the Solar System actually is

We absolutely love everything about space. We love it so much that we even went to see what South Africa’s National Space Agency (Sansa) gets up to on a regular basis.

But do we truly know what goes on out there? Do we have a grasp of how vast, empty and dark it actually is?

Thankfully designer and developer Josh Worth created one of the coolest maps of the Solar System that we have ever come across. A while back we showed you a map of all the stuff floating around earth, but Worth’s map takes things much, much further.

Worth describes his ‘If the Moon were only one pixel’ map (link at the bottom) as the most “tediously accurate” that you’ll find, and by using one pixel to represent our moon, it plots an accurate representation of the distances between planets from the sun.

Starting at the sun, users seemingly scroll endlessly to the right of the screen just to get to the heavenly body. Worth adds little notes and comments along the way, but it quickly starts to put things in perspective.

space

“Pictures in books, planetarium models, even telescopes are pretty misleading when it comes to judging just how big the universe can be. Are we doing ourselves a disservice by ignoring all the emptiness?” he writes on his blog.

Worth thought of other ways to represent the vastness of the universe, and eventually settled on what most of us know intimately – a computer screen.

“Not that pixels are any better at representing scale than golfballs, but they’re our main way of interpreting most information these days, so why not the solar system?”

So, what are you waiting for? Check out his map, and keep an eye on the kilometre count at the bottom as you scroll along.

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