I was reading an article on Stumbleupon that got me thinking about the size of the planets on a more imaginable scale – the distance between the Earth and moon.
Here is a video that shows what the other planets would look like from Earth if they orbited around us at a distance equal to that of the moon's distance.
His is a picture that shows the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
The following picture shows that all the planets, properly oriented, could fit between the Earth and moon. Because the planets are spinning, they tend to flatten at the poles. This drawing assumes that we do not line up the largest diameters.
Here is the sum of diameters that I came up with using WolframAlpha. It is close to what the image artist came up with.
Name | Diameter (km) |
Mercury | 4,879 |
Venus | 12,104 |
Mars | 6,771 |
Jupiter | 138,350 |
Saturn | 114,630 |
Uranus | 50,532 |
Neptune | 49,105 |
Total | 376,371 |