And today we’re going to use this tangerine to represent the Sun. And we’ll walk through

some scales so we can better understand the distances in outer space.

What we’re going to do is represent Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars…and they’re just

tiny grains of sand right there, come on in … take a closer look. Jupiter and Saturn

are represented by peanuts and well Saturn I don’t have any rings better than an onion,

so I put an onion on it. What I’m going to do next is I’m going

to put these in the distances that are easier for you to comprehend, or me to comprehend,

so come on! Let’s go outside to the park and take a look at this!

Represented here is our scale, here’s the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter,

and Saturn way out there! So come follow me let’s go take a look! The Sun. Mercury at

10.4 feet. Venus at 19.1 foot. The Earth at 26.6 feet. Mars at 41 feet. Just a little

bit further! Come on you can do it! There’s Jupiter at 138 feet. Next we’re going to

Saturn, it’s a little bit further out here, let’s go! At 253 feet, At 253 feet we have

Saturn. Now Pluto is over 1000 feet, Pluto is over 1000 feet that direction! We’ll

go over there next. Pluto at 1,050 feet, that’s way over there!

Our Solar system fits inside a small park when we scale the Sun to a tangerine. What’s

even more amazing is Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 launched 36 years ago hasn’t left our

solar system’s heliosphere. The distance between the Sun and Earth is

93 million miles, also known as 1 Astronomical Unit, an AU. Did you know if the Sun was turned

off like a light bulb, we wouldn’t know it for EIGHT minutes! Another astronomical

measurement is a Light Year. There are 63,240 Astronomical Units in ONE Light Year. Most

of our astrophotography targets are many thousands of light years away from the earth.

Back to our Tangerine Scale, One light Year is equivalent 319 miles! Proxima Centauri

is the closest star to earth At just over four light years! Using our tangerine Sun

Scale, Proxima Centauri would be 1,400 miles away!

The Distance from Earth to Mars is 33 Million Miles and if we used the tangerine sun scale,

our entire milky way would fit in-between Earth & Mars.

For most people, including me, it’s hard to understand the vast distances in outer

space. So the next time you try astrophotography, remember, chances are the light from your

distant target, may have left before human beings existed on planet earth!

I would like to thank everyone for subscribing and helping me reach a milestone of 1,000

subscribers! Thanks for watching and stay tuned for my

next video series where I’ll walk through the steps, using any telescope you might have,

on how to take images of the planets. We’ll see you soon! Bye!