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portmantuwed t1_jdpig9p wrote

Reply to comment by aurumae in [NASA on Twitter] Newly-discovered asteroid 2023 DZ2 will pass Earth more than 100,000 miles (161,000 km) away–about half the distance to the Moon–making its close approach at 3:51 p.m. EDT (12:51 p.m. PDT) by ICumCoffee

250k miles seems pretty accessible to me and not "mind-bogglingly huge". this sub regularly posts about jwst newest galaxy thats 13 billion light years away. a day or two ago had a long running joke about the distance between castor and pollux being like some quadrillion tennis courts or whatever

most americans will drive over 250k miles in their lifetime. if you've driven coast to coast you can imagine doing it 99 more times and how far that is. its so much more imaginable than a light year

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aurumae t1_jdppk9t wrote

My point was to illustrate that even though the moon is the closest thing to us in space the distances are still vast compared to the sizes of the planets themselves. The Earth and moon are often depicted as being practically on top of each other, but the distance between them is two orders of magnitude greater than the size of either body. Like I said the distance is so big that you could fit all the planets in the solar system between the Earth and the moon (though as someone pointed out, only at apogee). Of course, since the moon is the closest thing to us, other distances are going to be much more impressive, but the fact that you could drop a great big giant thing like Jupiter in between the Earth and the moon and for it not even to be a tight fit I found really helped me to get a sense of the distance.

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MyWALife t1_jdpprcw wrote

And not only that, I’ve seen the moon with my own eyes. I can definitely imagine, “halfway to that.”

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