18 Images That Show Your True Place in the Universe

The journey starts at home with a joke: “you” are the blue-eyed kitten resting on the sofa. It sets the human scale, roughly a metre or two, against which every other picture in this set is measured. Image: Diply.

From a cruising airliner at about 30,000 feet (some 9 km), a person on the ground is far too small to see, and even a snow-capped volcano rising through the clouds looks like a model. Commercial jets typically cruise between about 30,000 and 40,000 feet. Image: Flickr / Benjy.

At around 100,000 feet (about 30 km), roughly three times airliner height, the curve of the Earth becomes visible and the sky above turns dark. Altitudes like this are reached by high-altitude research balloons, not by aircraft. Image: Wikipedia.

Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner stands on the step of his capsule during the Red Bull Stratos mission on 14 October 2012. He jumped from 38,969 metres (127,851 feet) above New Mexico and reached about 1,358 km/h in freefall, faster than the speed of sound. His altitude record was later surpassed by Alan Eustace. Image: Red Bull Stratos, via Gen Beta.

This is “Earthrise”, taken by astronaut William Anders on 24 December 1968 during Apollo 8, the first crewed mission to orbit the Moon. The meme’s arrows add the joke that you are on the small blue world, not on the lunar surface in front. The Moon lies on average about 384,400 km (238,900 miles) from Earth, a little more than the 230,000 miles in the old caption. Image: NASA, via Iz / Smile.

Here the planets are lined up beneath the Sun, with an arrow pointing to tiny Earth. The Sun’s diameter is about 109 times Earth’s, around 1.3 million Earths would fit inside it, and it holds about 99.86% of all the mass in the Solar System. Image: Diply Facebook.

In this comparison the Sun is a tiny dot beside Sirius, Pollux and Arcturus, and Earth is too small to show at all. Arcturus, the fourth-brightest star in the night sky, is a red giant about 25 times the Sun’s radius, roughly 37 light-years away. Image: Compu-smart.

Zoom out again and Arcturus itself becomes a speck next to the red supergiants Betelgeuse and Antares. Betelgeuse’s radius is estimated at roughly 640 to 760 times the Sun’s, and Antares at about 680; placed where the Sun is, either would swallow the orbits of the inner planets. Charts like this are illustrations, and star sizes are refined as measurements improve. Image: Compu-smart.

This composite places Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko over Los Angeles for scale. Its larger lobe measures about 4.1 by 3.3 km. The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft reached it in August 2014, and the Philae lander touched down on 12 November 2014, the first landing on a comet nucleus, though it bounced twice before settling. Image: mental_floss.

This is not a selfie but the “Pale Blue Dot”, taken by Voyager 1 on 14 February 1990 from about 6 billion km away at Carl Sagan’s urging. Earth fills less than a single pixel, and the coloured streaks are sunlight scattered inside the camera. Sagan later used the image to reflect on how small our shared home is. Image: NASA/JPL, via Upworthy.

This infographic stacks the numbers: one person among billions, one planet of eight, one star system among about 100 billion in our galaxy, and one galaxy among many. Its population figure is now dated: the UN marked 8 billion people in November 2022. Estimates of galaxies in the observable universe range from roughly 200 billion to 2 trillion. Image: Fatherly Advice and Rants.

The opening panel of a popular Hubble infographic shows the “Blue Marble”, the famous view of the whole Earth taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. Its date is slightly off: the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field observations described in the next panels began on 23 September 2003, not 3 September. Image: Diply.

Astronomers pointed Hubble at a patch of sky in the constellation Fornax that looks empty to the eye, about a tenth of the full Moon’s width across. Exposures were spread over roughly four months, from September 2003 to January 2004, adding up to about a million seconds of observing time. Image: Diply.

The result, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, revealed an estimated 10,000 galaxies in that tiny speck; later, deeper images of the same field show galaxies as they were about 13.2 billion years ago. One claim in the graphic needs correcting: galaxies are not capped at a billion stars, since the Milky Way alone has hundreds of billions and the largest galaxies may hold around a hundred trillion. Image: Diply.

A spiral galaxy photographed from Arizona, said in the original caption to lie about 50 million light-years away. Its light left it long before humans existed, which means we see it as it was, not as it is. Image: Arizona Skycenter (Mount Lemmon SkyCenter).

Labelled “the grand scheme”, this image from the European Southern Observatory appears to show the Carina Nebula, a vast star-forming cloud inside our own galaxy about 8,500 light-years away. It contains Eta Carinae, one of the most massive and luminous stars known. It is spectacular, but it is a neighbourhood view, not the whole universe. Image: ESO.

A dense field of stars along the Milky Way, with a red arrow marking “you”. Our galaxy is about 87,000 light-years across and holds an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars, and the Sun sits about 27,000 light-years from its centre, taking more than 200 million years to complete one orbit. Image: The University of Edinburgh.

The final graphic turns the message around. You are one of billions, but your genetic makeup and fingerprints are yours alone, you can make art and music, and other people depend on you. Image: Fractal Dimensions.