To help illustrate the size of The Milky Way, I built this scale model of our galaxy. At a scale of three thousand billion billion to one, most of the stars we see in the night sky fit inside a hole just 3mm in diameter, Alpha Centauri is just 1/100 mm away. The model can be used to show just how far away some objects are located and how slowly the galaxy turns. Making just one rotation backwards places us at a time even before the dinosaurs existed. The Magellanic Clouds are just half a metre away and Andromeda is seven and a half metres. By pointing it up into the sky and alighing with the Milky Way we can see our orientation with the rest of the galaxy.
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