I am a fan of visualisations of this kind, starting with Eames' powers of ten, But this didn't impress me. The scale changes too arbitrarily to keep a feeling for the actual distances growing, and the wave line made no sense to me, just irritated. A better take on the subject (regarding overall composition, individual images and music could be better): http://htwins.net/scale2/
It took me a second to get the wave line (I thought it had something to do with time relativity, since there was a time scale) but it looks like the line is a literal 'string' of distance measurement just wound back and forth to compress it. If it's an accurate compression, I thought it was pretty clever and impressive.
> The scale changes too arbitrarily to keep a feeling for the actual distances growing,
Yeah, this is the issue I have with it as well. The whole point of these things is to get a feel for the scale, which is totally impossible if the scale keeps changing.
The most amazing thing for me was that Cassini (1.50bn kms) is 300 million miles away from Saturn (1.20bn kms), but still it is orbiting Saturn.
Is this just the furthest point of its elliptical orbit? Or is it typical of how we send spacecraft to orbit other planets? Or is it a typo?
I ask because according to the infographic, our communications satellites are at a tiny 35,000 kms, whereas 300 million kms is twice the distance from Earth to the Sun...
That is wrong. Cassini's apogee (aposelene) is inside the orbit of Iapetus, which is 3.5m km from Saturn. Cassini does not fly by Iapetus in its tours; the orbit was adjusted to do so once but will not happen again.
The graphic is representing the distance of Saturn at its closest point to Earth (as it does with Mars and Venus), but the distance of Cassini at its farthest point from Earth. The latter is larger by the diameter of Earth's orbit which is your 300m km difference.
Would have been nicer, although admittedly much more impractical, if the scale didn't keep on changing. Didn't quite fill me with as much awe as numbers those large should have.
