..............PLANETs

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The sun: its mean distance from the earth is nearly 150.000.000 kilometers (about 93,000.000 miles). The sun diameter sums up to almost 1.4 million kilometers (about 864,000 miles) and its mass is about 330.000 times that of the earth. Our homeplanet could find place more than a million times within the sunball. Even if one would place planet earth right into the center of the sun, the moon would orbit the earth within the sun. The sun contains 99,86% of the mass of our solar system. Light takes about 8 minutes to reach Earth. And - the sun is only one out of at least one hundred billion of stars in the generally known universe, so far.

`isolation´ by Sid Venus

Above, the sun was captured by Skylab in 1973 throwing off one of its largest eruptive prominences in recorded history.

Let`s try it another way round to imagine how huge the sun really is in comparison with our earthly human dimensions.

Assuming that a person could fully walk around the sun`s equator by an averaged day`s hike of 50 kilometers, this venture would take him about 240 years of walking!!!

free but song / `rose´ by tedin

For the distance to the moon the same person had to estimate 21 years of heading, whereas it would only cost one a relatively short period of a bit more than two years to go round the earth equator. How about it?

(By the way: a plane at a speed of 10.000 km/day would be on the way for more than 13 months to circle the sun.)

We don`t want to start to report here on distances between solitary stars and even galaxies - but one thing is for sure: it is simply incredible and beyond our natural capacity of perception.

Andromeda galaxy - 2,2 million lightyears away   /  our neighbour galaxy

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