Magnifying the Universe: Move From Atoms to Galaxies in HD

Copy­right 2012. Mag­ni­fy­ing the Uni­verse by Num­ber Sleuth.

Before you do any­thing else, click on the image above and then move lit­tle slid­er (along the bot­tom of the image) from left to right. Now watch the uni­verse fly by, going from macro to micro. Pret­ty cool, no? Now read on:

This dynam­ic info­graph­ic comes to us via Num­ber Sleuth, who describes their won­der­ful cre­ation as fol­lows:

This inter­ac­tive info­graph­ic accu­rate­ly illus­trates the scale of over 100 items with­in the observ­able uni­verse rang­ing from galax­ies to insects, neb­u­lae and stars to mol­e­cules and atoms. Numer­ous hot points along the zoom slid­er allow for direct access to plan­ets, ani­mals, the hydro­gen atom and more. As you scroll, a handy dial spins to show you your present mag­ni­fi­ca­tion lev­el.

While oth­er sites have tried to mag­ni­fy the uni­verse, no one else has done so with real pho­tographs and 3D renderings.…We hope you have a blast mag­ni­fy­ing the uni­verse, know that each time you zoom in a depth, you’re mag­ni­fy­ing the uni­verse 10x … and every time you zoom out, the big­ger objects are 1/10th of their pri­or size. If you zoom from the biggest object, The Observ­able Uni­verse, all the way down to the hydro­gen atom­’s pro­ton nucle­us, you will have zoomed in over 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000x! Unbe­liev­able isn’t it? Our uni­verse real­ly is immense­ly mas­sive and sur­pris­ing­ly small.

If you’re famil­iar with the work of Ray and Charles Eames, this info­graph­ic will almost cer­tain­ly remind you of Pow­ers of Ten, the Eames’ 1977 film. That’s some­thing we’re going to talk about more on Mon­day. For more info on how to use Mag­ni­fy­ing the Uni­verse, please see the instruc­tions here. 

via @coudal