My yarn is bigger than Pluto

After this year's Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco, I traveled south to visit my folks in Los Angeles for three days. On my third day we visited the recently(ish) reopened Griffith Observatory. It was my first time there since they finished renovations in 2006.

It's been years since I've been there, but from the front, as you come up the hill, the Observatory looks much the same. Most of the renovations were focused on expanding into the hill below the original building, creating a whole new exhibit space. In this exhibit space, they have what they call the "Big Picture," an entire wall that's devoted to a huge photograph 20 feet high by 152 feet wide of a piece of the sky that would be covered by your index finger if you held it about a foot away from your eyes.

Blown up to that scale, you can see millions of stars, galaxies, asteroids, and other "celestial objects." For me, the amazing thing about it isn't so much the hugeness, or the number of stars, or even the variety in them--the different colors, sizes, even shapes--but that it's such a tiny slice of the sky.

I like stars. I can't identify any constellations, other than Orion (sometimes I can see the Big Dipper as well) and I've spent much of my life in places with so much light pollution that I'm usually lucky to see a handful of stars, if that, and the rare times I get out beyond city lights, the number of stars in the sky astonish me. But even on the darkest, clearest night, the stars you can see with the naked eye are only a tiny fraction of what's out there.

Of course, because when we talk about stars and planets, the scale is always so far outside our general comprehension, you either have to make things much bigger or much smaller than they are. Which leads to amusing discoveries such as this one, captured in photographic form for all to see:

That big orange ball in the foreground? That's my ball of yarn. The little orange ball behind it? It's Pluto. Yes, that's right, once poor little Pluto was declassified as a planet, it became so dejected that it shrank. And now my yarn is bigger than Pluto!

(Before anyone gets truly concerned, Pluto the non-planet is still actually larger than my ball of yarn. It's only Pluto the scale model that is smaller.)

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Posted by Claire Smith on May 07, 2009 at 06:05 pm EST

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