Scale solar system presentation slide, version 2

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla

2011/10/31 01:14 CDT

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Last month I posted a preliminary version of a slide I was working on for use in my public presentations, a slide that contains everything in the solar system bigger than 400 kilometers across, and invited comment. I've listened to all of your comments and corrections and come up with a second version. One of the most frequent comments was that the overlapping of the giant planets created an optical illusion, making people think that it was perspective that diminished the sizes of Uranus and Neptune, which made Saturn appear larger than Jupiter. I liked overlapping the giant planets for aesthetic reasons, but am trying a non-overlapping version in this new one. What do you think?

© 2011 Emily Lakdawalla, the Planetary Society. Images from NASA / JPL & JHUAPL missions, processed by Björn Jónsson, Mattias Malmer, Ted Stryk, & Gordan Ugarkovic. TNO art by NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

Scale solar system presentation slide (version 2)

A view of the largest objects in the solar system (other than the Sun), to scale with each other, everything larger than 400 kilometers in diameter. 102 Kuiper belt objects are included, a number based on estimates of diameter from measured absolute magnitudes.

For reference, here's what version 1 looked like.