To put it another way

Fortunately my classes are held in a room adjacent to a long hallway, so I
can take the students and line them up to (approximately) represent the
solar system's scale. If the Sun is 100 feet away from Pluto, the Earth is
2.5' from the Sun.
At this scale the Sun is just over 1/4" in diameter (.286") and the next
nearest star is 130 miles away, and the galaxy is about 3,000,000 miles in
diameter.

Bob

"Martin R. Howell" wrote in message
...

One of my favorite little astro thingies goes like this:

If the Milky Way were reduced in scale such that the Sun assumed the size
of a basketball, then it would take a page the size of the North American
continent on which to image the rest of the galaxy.



--
Martin
"Photographs From the Universe of Amateur Astronomy"
http://home.earthlink.net/~martinhowell