Next time I’m pissed at someone I’ll tell ‘em to cram it up Georgium Siderus. Hah.
Yes, I’m immature. What of it?

@MTU (#35): “this planet is Saturn – the Roman name for the Greek god Chronos.”
Not quite. The Greek equivalent of the Roman Saturn is Cronus (or Kronos), not Chronos. Two different entities. So, Phil should probably have written “encronusate,” not “encronosate.” But when it comes to neologisms, who’s to say what the proper spelling should be (if not he/she who coins it)?

Fair enough – thanks. I’ll try to remember that in future.

I’d really love to see that put into practice even if it would take an awfully long time to get to my favourite planet – Pluto!

(Guess they could cheat just slightly and have Pluto located at its perihelion distance of just 29.6 Astronomical Units rather than its aphelion one of 49.3 AU. Mean distance of 5,900 million kilometers or 330 minutes (5.5 hours) as the photon flies. Waiting till we get to Sedna may test my patience though! )

*****

FWIW & if it helps :

Planet = Travel time at light speed (Heading out from Sun in straight line.)

Mercury = 3.2 minutes

Venus = 6.0 minutes

Earth =8.3 minutes (Light takes about 2 seconds travelling between Earth & Moon.)

Mars = 13 minutes

Ceres = ??

Jupiter =43 minutes

Saturn = 79 minutes

Ouranos / 34 Tauri / Georgium Siderus = 159 minutes (2.7 hours)

Neptune = 246 minutes (4.1 hours)

Pluto = 330 minutes (5.5 hours)

Eris = ???

Haumea = ???

Makemake = ???

Quaoar = ???

Sedna = ???

NB. 1 light year = the distance travelled by light in a year = 63,240 AU or 0.30660 parsec

1 parsec = the distance a star would have a parallax of 1 second of arc
= 206,265 AU or 3.2616 light year

The “pointers” to the Southern Cross are two of the brightest stars in our sky. The lower one is Alpha Centauri our nearest stellar neighbour at 4.3 light years away and a binary of yellow and orange dwarfs. The other, a blue supergiant called Hadar, Agena or Beta Centauri appears almost as bright to us but lies some 460 352 light years away! Click on my name for source link – ‘Beta Centauri Weighs In’ by Ken Croswell published 2004 November 15th.

Predictable I know, but someone had to say it …

“this planet is Saturn – the Roman name for the Greek god Chronos”

Not quite. The Greek equivalent of the Roman Saturn is Cronus (or Kronos), not Chronos. Two different entities. So, Phil should probably have written “encronusate,” not “encronosate.” But when it comes to neologisms, who’s to say what the proper spelling should be (if not he/she who coins it)?

One shortcoming I find about the Powers of 10 video. The steady shifting in scale at a logarithmic rate is something that human beings cannot naturally do. So one lesson that the young or disinterested may take away is that it is possible to experience the entire universe in about 3 minutes!

I suspect that a truer sense would be gained from experiencing a trip to a local group star, at speeds we can achieve today. As the minutes tick into hours and no noticeable progress was being made (in terms of the total time needed), I think that scale would be experienced at a human level.

Of course this kind of thing won’t do when constant stimulation is needed to keep the audience engaged. But the likely monotony of real interstellar space travel would be an eye opener for some.

Its a word game the Bad Astronomer plays and has done for years here where the word ‘enlarge’ is changed into something else related to the subject matter of the image.

For instance, since this planet is Saturn – the Roman name for the Greek god Chronos – the BA has chosen to invent “encronosate” to replace ‘enlarge’ in this case. No, I don’t know what the BA has against the word ‘enlarge’ but clearly he wishes to avoid.

I believe it stems from an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ where Mr Burns uses the non-word “embiggen” and when someone objects the response is generally that its “a perfectly cromulent word” – again referring to that episode. Some folks like that neologistic game here and others don’t but either way, its just one of the BA’s quirks which he’s not going to stop and something you get used to after a while here. Hope that helps.

“Space isn’t remote at all. Its only an hour away if your car could go straight upwards.”
- Page 43, Sir Fred Hoyle, ‘The Wonderful World of Space’ , Heather Couper, Octopus Books, 1980.

(But …)

“If it were possible to drive straight from the Earth to Neptune, taking the shortest possible route and keeping up a steady 60 m.p.h., the journey would take nearly 5,200 years.”
- Page 57, ‘The Sky at Night’, Patrick Moore, WW. Norton & Co, 1986.

“If we could transport Phobos and Diemos to our own Moon, they would fit comfortably inside the wide crater Copernicus with room enough for two moons of similar size.”
- Stephen James O’Meara, page 102 “The Demon Sprites of Mars” in ‘Sky & Telescope’ magazine, June 2001.

“To get a sense of the scale of the Jovian system, consider that if the Earth was placed at the centre of Jupiter, our Moon would lie inside the orbit of [Jupiter’s nearest large moon] Io, while distant [outer moon] Sinope would be a third of way to Mars.”
- P. 186, Ferris, ‘Seeing in the Dark’, Simon & Schuster, 2002.

“Jupiter’s magnetosphere, the wasp-shaped zone within which its magnetic field takes precedence over the charged particles constituting the solar wind, extends more than seven million miles ahead of the planet in the direction of its orbital motion, … and trails so far behind that it sometimes impinges upon Saturn.”
- P. 186, Ferris, ‘Seeing in the Dark’, Simon & Schuster, 2002.

“If our Earth is 1 cm from our Sun – & Pluto is 50 cm from it – then the edge of the Oort Cloud of Comet’s would be 1/2 a kilometer away!”
– Brian Cox, ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ documentary. (Paraphrased from memory so hope I’ve got that right but pretty sure I have. Circa March 1st 2011.)

“If you put three grains of sand inside a vast cathedral, that cathedral will be more densely packed with grains of sand than stars are found apart in space.”
- British astronomer Sir James Jeans quoted on page 28, ‘Skywatching’, David H. Levy, Ken Fin Books, 1995.

“Around us is a vast galaxy arrayed on scales so gigantic that galactic structure becomes discernible only once the solar system has dwindled to a dot the size of the period of this sentence.”
- P.211, Ferris, ‘Seeing in the Dark’, Simon & Schuster, 2002.

“Cosmology also tells us that there are perhaps 100 billion galaxies in the universe and that each contains roughly 100 billion stars. By a curious co-incidence, 100 billion is also the approximate number of cells in a human brain.”
- Page 237, ‘StarGazer’, Dr Fred Watson, Allen & Unwin, 2004.

“Yet here we are with our eyes and our minds and our curiosity, six+ billion passengers aboard a tiny blue boat, bobbing and wheeling our way around one vast Catherine wheel among many.”
- P.246, Ferris, ‘Seeing in the Dark’, Simon & Schuster, 2002.

+ Today that figure is apparently seven billion humans – less than a decade later.

*****

Size is, of course, relative and much depends on your point of view. (Size also depends on how fast an object is travelling as near light-speed shapes as well as masses are distorted -at least from an observers perspective – if I understand Einsteinian physics right. )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEheh1BH34Q

&

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=iv&v=2FwCMnyWZDg&annotation_id=annotation_208405&src_vid=vpUWNYgVEfk&fmt=22

one are my personal favourites.

This one :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIy76M-4txo

is a classic too – even if it is a smidgin outdated.

(Mild language warning at the very end of the song.)